Date: Fri, 05 Sep 1997 18:37:40 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: A quick note to those without DNS resolvable mail hosts. Message-ID: <26041.873509860@time.cdrom.com>
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Reply-to: postmaster@freebsd.org
In order to combat the absolute flood of spam which has been coming
into my mailbox lately, I've gone to more aggressive sendmail filtering
which:
A) Blocks mail from you if you don't have a valid hostname
(this means that I've been bouncing mail from hosts like
"moose.mindspring.com" and "yokota.mech.kobe-u.ac.jp",
both of which probably represent actual legitimate
attempts to send me mail).
B) Blocks anything ever registered by Spamford Wallace
(host table available from http://tech.gulf.net/spam)
Since I instituted these procedures, life has been far, far better and
there's no way I'm ever going back to a non-filtered mailer. Since
there are some of you out there who still use non-registered mail
hosts, however, I thought I'd raise this more publically so that you're
aware that:
A) I'm not getting your mail.
B) mail.freebsd.org is about to go to a very similar scheme if
it hasn't already, and your inability to send mail to me will
shortly become an inability to send mail to *anyone* at
FreeBSD.org!
I know that some of you are also saying right now that this is bogus
and that you've been sending mail from ``fred@not-really.a.domain''
for years now without trouble, why should it suddenly be an issue, why
are we such Nazi scumbags, etc. and so forth. I can answer that
question in one word: SPAM.
None of us have time to aggressively maintain a spam filter *and* get
work done, and it's an inescapable fact that a huge percentage of the
spam we receive comes with machines with no valid DNS entries -
blocking mail by this criteria is *the single most effective way* of
blocking SPAM and there's simply no way that we can go back to the old
way of doing things without leaving ourselves open to numerous adverts
for teen sex, pictures of Wanda the Naugty Nurse and invitations to
the latest pyramid scam. Enough is enough!
If you're sending mail from a machine with no valid DNS entry then I
have another one word answer for you: Don't. By doing so, you're only
doing the spiritual equivalent of giving yourself an AOL.COM address
and lumping yourself in with a group of people you probably really
don't want to be lumped in with. Relay your mail to a "smart host" if
you're at some company with a lot of bogusly named machines or
otherwise mask the bogus names behind some mail agent with a more
legitimate presence on the net if you want to see your mail continue
to get to folks like myself or, soon, the entire FreeBSD project.
Those who see far less spam in their mailboxes as a result of our
protecting the FreeBSD mailing lists this way will thank you for not
raising a fuss and simply going along with this proposal quietly. I,
who already see far far less spam in my mailbox as a result of this,
will also thank you. :-)
This has been a public service announcement, sent to -hackers for the
widest possible distribution. Follow-ups which say anything but
"Waaaaaa! You guys suck!" (see comments above) should probably go to
the postmaster and/or myself.
Thanks!
Jordan
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