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Spam Blackhole Lists Redux
tsu doh nimh writes "Are spam blackhole lists good, bad or indifferent? That appears to be the question they're tackling in this Washington Post story. It has some interesting back and forth between supporters of the lists and those who claim they condone censorship."
J adds: Brad Templeton recently
offered some comments
on the most extreme pro-blacklist position.
And they're not. They go against the spirit of the Internet. What makes it great is that everybody HAS a voice, and when we start talking about who should have a voice and who shouldn't we start to sound a lot like fascists. Doesn't matter that it's speech we don't agree with, because it's just a matter of time before the whole thing is so watered down that nobody in their right mind will bother to use it (like amateur radio nowadays...)
Why don't we just create a system where we all only accept mail that has been PGP encrypted with our public keys? That way spammers will have to burn through a whole lot of clock cycles to get their crap out and as an added benefit, we will get a bit more privacy.
I set my mail server to tag emails rather than block them (move to spam folder on workstation), so i see some interesting things...
When i first tried it 6 months ago, it magically worked, 99% of spam ended up in my spam folder.
Now the blocking ratio is down to about 10%... and here's why. There are 3 MX records for us:
A - linux server - MX = 10
B - msexchange server - MX = 20
C - isp's server - MX = 30
messages delivered to A are tagged (if spam) and forwarded to B. B exists in the MX records for redundancy. C is used because A and B are on the same site.
What i'm finding though, is that spammers send emails to B or C. When A receives the email, it has come from B or C, not the original spammer, so suddenly the blocking doesn't work anymore.
dammit.
It can only work if everyone in your MX record list does it, and my isp is the biggest in Australia so it's an awfully large machine to move.
I have tried adding in more dummy MX records, so that A is first, middle, and last. That seemed to work for a bit but not for long. I might have more success adding different ip addresses for A and peppering the MX list with those... but it's a bit messy.
Still, how effective can a blacklist, however well implemented & maintained, really be? Isn't this one of the easier types of blocks for spammers to get around?
If everyone would just stop trying to grow their penises, turn $5 into $5000, and visit XXChristyXX in her all-nude sorority, spam would wither and die. Lately, I've received some very helpful emails about how to stop spam and make money in the process, secrets I will be sharing with about 16 million fellow computer users very shortly.
--Michael"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
Anyway, the point is, if you say something on your website (such as "niggers are great"), I do not have to read it. However, if you send me a nice big jpeg, with a smiling porch-monkey, that says "niggers are great", I end up having to deal with it. If I felt the need for a larger penis and an unaccredited degree, I'll bet Google could help me find places to get that... I don't need someone telling me shit I don't want to know.
You know, I've seen some really good posts from you that get undeserved hostile replies based solely on who you are and what your unpopular political positions represent. (I know you're only karma whoring to keep your score above 0, but that's sort of irrelevant, really.) You recently wrote this excellent post about calculating bolometric luminosity- and the discussion quickly degenerated into a brawl about racism, with people inappropriately screaming at the moderators for marking your post as Informative, followed by Anonymous Cowards putting in their own racist two cents. I even defended you once, and pointed out that a moderation applies to a post and not its author. (Thus whoring some karma for myself in the process, and making it onto your friends list- so if anyone looks at my fans list now, they'll see "I'm a racist" listed there.)
You're certainly a character- a racist with a degree in astrophysics- in fact you seem like you'd be an interesting person to know in real life. But if people start screaming "mod this racist down" this time, I cannot defend you. Your actual post was needlessly and purposefully offensive, which is sad because otherwise it does bring up a valuable and subtle point. You just had to spoil it.
Besides, I can't imagine getting an email saying "niggers are great". It simply makes no sense. Unless it's a white supremacist being sarcastic. And it doesn't fit this situation, since it's political speech. Spam is inherently commercial speech. For your analogy to work, the spam would have to be offering them for sale, not simply saying they were "great".
Kudos for simultaneously karma-whoring and slipping the words "nigger" and "porch monkey" into your post. I rarely see anyone pull that off.
Our small ISP hosts email and web sites for about 40 domains. Our mail servers send me a message every time they bounce a message, for ANY reason, with transcripts of the exchange and the error that caused the bounce. We use SpamCop, Blitzed, Monkeys and ORDB to suppliment our internal lists.
A typical day has 500-1000 messages reach the SMTP ports of our various servers. Lately, 80% or more of them (over 3000 in the last 4 days) are attempts by spammers to hit addresses that don't exist, usually arriving from open relays, proxies, and dial-up lines. And only 50% of those test positive against the RBLs... the rest are blocked by those internal lists.
Why is this? I suspect it's because the spammers are finding those open relays and proxies faster than the RBLs can catch up. And some open relays specifically block the test software from ORDB and others, trying to stay off the lists without actually fixing their problems.
Lately, though, it's the open proxies that have taken the lead. We added over 1800 NEW open proxies to our internal lists in the last week. Sometimes, one spammer will try dozens of proxies within hours to get through... Kind of makes it easy to spot them... B-)