Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 19:53:59 -0700 (PDT) From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb> To: hackers Subject: spam and the FreeBSD mailing lists Message-ID: <199709070254.TAA21387@hub.freebsd.org>
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in light of the recent discussion of spam and the changes in sendmail configuration on the FreeBSD mailing list host (hub.freebsd.org), here are my thoughts on the matter and how we have implemented the changes. the primary goal is to preserve the FreeBSD mailing lists as a useful source of information and discussion for the subscribers. the mail archives, digests and mailing list search web page are all "extra" features to increase the usefulness of the mailing lists. each major topic, and some minor ones, have a dedicated list; the purpose is to provide information of interest to the subscribers without a large amount of extraneous material, including but not limited to spam. in order to fulfill this goal, the mail must be delivered to the subscibers. majordomo, bulk_mailer and the mail relay sites are configured to speed the mail its destination. getting the information out to as large an audience as possible is a secondary goal and the reason for the mail-to-news gateways. news reaches a much larger number of people than our mailing lists. this provides FreeBSD a presence on the 'net that the mailing lists alone can not provide. however, newsgroups have an unfortunate level of junk (flamefests, spam, and more). therefore, the mail- to-news gateways are one-way doors. a person reading a FreeBSD newsgroup can subscribe to the list(s) and participate, but they must subscribe to do so. so what does this have to do with spam? when preventing spam from reaching subscribers interferes with the purpose of the mailing lists, delivering the mail with some quantity of spam is more important than stopping every spam. for example, we recently received spam from two sources: intergate.net and compuserve.com. intergate.net is an isp in georgia, usa and compuserve is.....well you know what compuserve is. if i was to block mail from intergate.net and compuserve.com, i would have prevented these spam emails from reaching the subscribers. in doing so, i would have blocked mail from 45 subscribers to the mailing lists. (jenny@intergate.net, a spammer today, may be a legitimate user next month when the email address is given to someone else.) therefore, we are not blocking mail from sites that can not be resolved in the DNS. not that i dont want to, there are just too many newbies out there that send mail to the lists. we are not "hiding" email addresses in messages that go to the mail-to-news gateways. we want people to be able to send mail to each other. sendmail and procmail provide methods of preventing spam from reaching you. the anti-spam rules that i have installed on hub.freebsd.org are based upon those available from http://tech.gulf.net/spam/. i expect that they will become more elaborate over time ;(. those of you with a perverse interest in sendmail files and accounts on hub can look in /usr/src/.usr.sbin/sendmail/cf/cf/hub.mc. those with perverse interest but without accounts on hub, please me email and i will send the config file(s) to you. (if there is sufficient interest, i'll post them on the list). jmb -- Jonathan M. Bresler FreeBSD Core Team, Postmaster jmb@FreeBSD.ORG FreeBSD--4.4BSD Unix for PC clones, source included. http://www.freebsd.org/ PGP 2.6.2 Fingerprint: 31 57 41 56 06 C1 40 13 C5 1C E3 E5 DC 62 0E FB
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