Date: Fri, 5 Sep 1997 20:50:51 -0600 (MDT) From: Brandon Gillespie <brandon@roguetrader.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A quick note to those without DNS resolvable mail hosts. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970905203709.8748A-100000@roguetrader.com> In-Reply-To: <19970906112341.62007@lemis.com>
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On Sat, 6 Sep 1997, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Fri, Sep 05, 1997 at 06:37:40PM -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > I can't make up my mind yet whether this isn't overkill, but probably > I don't get the level of spam you do. I do see one big problem, > though: FreeBSD-questions. A lot of the people out there either are > complete newcomers to FreeBSD, or they lack the experience and > understanding to comply with the new requirements. A lot of them are > AOL. By implementing these measures, you may not kill -questions, but > you'd certainly significantly reduce (maybe by up to half) the volume, > and you would do even more harm to people who are interested and are > just looking in. I personally used to receive about 5-10 spam messages a day. I installed the same thing Jordan just did, while back, and life has been wonderful. It has cut-out about 90% of the spam I would receive, in that one simple change. I also receive a lot of mail from various people around the net, as does my list server--I have yet to hear a single complaint about bogus domains. The fact of the matter is, people ARE actually getting better about legitimizing their DNS records. Frankly the fact that you can send from a bogus DNS address is a *BUG* and should never have been allowed (imho)--sending mail should also imply being able to receive from the same address, if not then somebody probably needs to fix their sendmail config to reflect the correct domain address.. the easiest way is to simply add the line: DMreal.domain where 'real.domain' is your mail relay. Then all mail is sent from 'real.domain' and not whatever 'hostname' is. Basically, I highly doubt that installing these measures on freebsd.org will effect or reduce the volume of messages sent to any great degree--if it does it will NOT be half, more like about 1% or even 0.5% of the _legitimate_ (be it incorrectly configured) mail will be bounced--more may be bounced, but thats the whole idea behind anti-spam rules. > I've taken a quite look at http://tech.gulf.net/spam/, and note that > they have a list of blacklisted IP addresses as well. Wouldn't that > be an alternative to domain names? Not really, as most of the point-n-click software available now intentionally does its best to mask the sender, so they do not even use their own domain name (you have to usually dig this out of three or four levels of Received/relay information). The way it masks is to usually specify a completely bogus email address, such as: reply@with.phone.call (a common address) I for one am very glad to see these measures being installed on freebsd.org, and can only say: hallelujah! -Brandon
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