From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 24 20:59:36 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: ports@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2836816A421 for ; Thu, 24 May 2007 20:59:36 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from walter@natural-innovations.com) Received: from natural-innovations.com (natural-innovations.com [128.121.98.235]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0FD5D13C457 for ; Thu, 24 May 2007 20:59:36 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from walter@natural-innovations.com) Received: from [192.168.10.103] (ip66-106-175-34.z175-106-66.customer.algx.net [66.106.175.34]) by natural-innovations.com (8.12.11.20060614/8.11.2) with ESMTP id l4OKxYOa010317 for ; Thu, 24 May 2007 13:59:35 -0700 (PDT) Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: X-Quote: I wasn't innocent till I got older. --WIK X-Calibur: Signifying that I, Arthur, was to become King of the Britons X-Mailer: Eudora Pro 5.1.1 on Mac OS X 10.4.9 X-Image-URL: http://www.natural-innovations.com/mailpictures/walter Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 14:00:03 -0700 To: ports@freebsd.org From: Walter Ian Kaye Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Cc: Subject: Re: email addresses and spam X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 20:59:36 -0000 At 12:20 p -0700 05/24/2007, Chuck Swiger didst inscribe upon an electronic papyrus: >On May 24, 2007, at 12:02 PM, Walter Ian Kaye wrote: >>All right, who released my email address to spammers? > >Nobody. Spammers routinely search for email addresses by scraping >Google, websites, mailing list archives, and even word-list >dictionaries or random number generators. > >>I send mail to ports@freebsd.org, and 2 weeks later I get spam. >>That is not cool, people. You MUST make sure that never happens. >>Now I have to blacklist this address. Sheesh. > >Welcome to the Internet, as (presumably!) you are new here. Hardly new. Been here for 15 years. >The FreeBSD postmaster already spends a lot of resources to try to >keep these mailing lists (mostly) spam-free, but there's nothing >that we can do to prevent a spammer from sending email to you after >you've chosen to make your email address available by sending mail >to a public list, and this is going to be true of other mailing >lists elsewhere, web forums, Usenet, and so forth. I had NO idea this was a public list. I THOUGHT it was a private distribution to the ports people. Now you (all) understand my surprise. >Most people deal with spam by setting up some combination of MTA >checking, greylisting, and spam-filtering via Amavis/SpamAssassin/ >dspam/ClamAV/etc rather than creating new email addresses, but you >can do as you see fit. I do both. In fact, I wrote my own spam filter in Perl, and it deletes 95% of the email which arrives, catching 99% of the spam. I had *whitelisted* this special recipient address to ensure I got the mail I wanted, but now I see I cannot keep it whitelisted, or else it will be whitelisting spam as well. :/ Perhaps I can conditionally whitelist it if ports@freebsd.org is one of the recipients. Maybe that's the best setup. So now that everything's clear (I hope), let's put this thread to rest. Thank you.