From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Sep 6 07:27:47 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id HAA15272 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 6 Sep 1997 07:27:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pandora.hh.kew.com (root@kendra.ne.mediaone.net [24.128.53.73]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id HAA15267 for ; Sat, 6 Sep 1997 07:27:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sonata (sonata.hh.kew.com [192.195.203.135]) by pandora.hh.kew.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA19760; Sat, 6 Sep 1997 10:27:24 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3411686F.FD0A78E3@kew.com> Date: Sat, 06 Sep 1997 10:27:59 -0400 From: Drew Derbyshire Organization: Kendra Electronic Wonderworks X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.01 [en]C-MOENE (WinNT; U) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Brandon Gillespie CC: john hood , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A quick note to those without DNS resolvable mail hosts. X-Priority: 3 (Normal) References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > Er, my example was horribly bad, as its contradicting my previous stand on > having valid domains for receiving email :) I guess for the mailing list > situation, how would people feel about simply a bogus user? I.e: > > brandon-NIXTHIS@roguetrader.com > > The best solution (imho) would be to actually restrict the uunet gateways > with a stipulation that they must mask all email addresses. I don't like it. Not being able to hit reply to a message like this makes it a royal pain the moving parts. Relatively simple SPAM filters in sendmail (including the bad DNS bounce Jordan is now using, several bad guys lists, and my own source code hack to blow off numeric addresses, which I WILL publish one of these days), you can detect and purge most bad mail. Even with my eight year old address in the NIC 'whois' database and numerous references to it on the web and in Usenet, I don't get more than one or two SPAM's a day, relative to the 5 - 10 spams I see at my soon to be former employer with a much less publicized address, and that's without any procmail filters. (procmail, applied well, can take it down to zero.) Also, addresses can bounce within your domain if the gateway can't resolve the bogus user. Furthermore, if you mask addresses automatically, the pattern will be predictable and therefore strippable. You could locally mask with user+localinfo (note the plus sign) and use that for forwarding/filtering with sendmail 8.8.x -- then if you fail to provide an alias for the user+localinfo, it is delivered correctly to the user (sans +localinfo). -ahd- -- Internet: ahd@kew.com Voice: 617-279-9810 Beautiful loser, read it on the wall And realize, you just don't need it all. . . " - Bob Seger