Date: 05 Aug 2002 11:24:07 -0700 From: Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@artlogix.com> To: Ganesh Kumar <alganesh@m-net.arbornet.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I KINDLY NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE Message-ID: <86n0s12mgo.fsf@ralf.artlogix.com> In-Reply-To: <20020805025023.K94408-100000@m-net.arbornet.org> References: <20020805025023.K94408-100000@m-net.arbornet.org>
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Ganesh Kumar <alganesh@m-net.arbornet.org> writes: | Can anyone give suitable suggestions for stopping [spam]? Mail filters generate too many false positives, don't screen out all the spam, and still permit the traffic to occupy your network. The spam isn't the problem---the ISPs who operate open relays or who permit spammers to stay on their networks are. The only viable solution I've found is to block the spammers at the connection level. Since midnight, August 1, I've blocked 82 spams. 50 of those were spam attempts from South Korea, 8 from China, 3 from quixnet.net, one from ttd.es, one from t-dialin.net, and the other 18 were blocked by spamcop.net's blackhole service. My bounce messages (the ones that are blocked by my list rather than external blackhole lists) include a sneakemail.com contact address, so that anyone trying to send legitimate email can still contact me---but I can deactivate that address quickly if someone tries to use it for spamming. That's 82 spams that never made it onto my network in 4.5 days, with no false positives. Pretty cool. Of course, my little collection of domains aren't well-trafficked, like freebsd.org, so they probably couldn't afford to be as draconian as I've been. I've blocked some major ISPs in other countries that just couldn't get their crap together (wanadoo.fr, for example), and then some countries were just such humongous sources of spam that I started blocking them entirely. If I do get a responsible admin (it's happened---once) writing me over the sneakemail.com address, and I'm satisfied they're sincere and responsive, I unblock their net. The only way I can see that will actually stop spam is if enough people block spam at the connection level that ISPs are forced to clean up their act. I do wish the FreeBSD people would do so on their mailing lists, which are popular enough that it would surely create customer pressure on the offending ISPs. But I'm not in charge of that. :) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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