Slashdot Mirror
University Capitulates, Switches Off Spam Filters
Heraklit writes "As reported on German news site Heise, the system administrators of the Technical University of Braunschweig have temporarily given up the fight against spam. Because of the legal obligation to deliver all mail and of the delay time exceeding critical 5 days(!), they decided to switch off all filter mechanisms. Before, the 20 servers dedicated to processing e-mail alone had been breaking down under a load of 100000 unprocessed mail messages, ca. 98% of which had been spam or viruses. ... A similar e-mail jam occurred recently at the IT central of the German Federal Government.
Is this the beginning of the end of e-mail?" (The Fish may be useful.)
Shark jumps email!
Does anybody know the filtering methods they were using before they decided to toss everything to wind?
As Seen On TV's? Come back!!!
Just white list known good addresses. Hand out auth tokens (X-Not-Spam: md5 digest here) and white list those temporarily. And white list known good PGP keys.
Byebye, spam.
Byebye, email.
If you don't filter out any of the spam, then some mail server somewhere is gonna have to store all that junk mail. Even with a quota system I'd expect that there'd be a whole bunch of people just "giving up" on e-mail.
"they decided to switch off all filter mechanisms"
Finally, I can get my "male enhancement" emails again.
what sort of awful sound the servers made as soon as the filters were turned off? ...I imagine it would be akin to someone who 'just' made it in a mad dash to the bathroom.
Perhaps just disabling spam filters and leaving virus blocks in place would be a less drastic approach. Detecting spam is non-trivial, but detecting viruses is not. They are easily found and the email should be blocked. This is implemented by my ISP (Road Runner NYC). Emails containing viruses are replaced by a text message warning that a virus was sent to the email address.
Site's a little slow -
Akamai Mirror.
Spam wave?rrollt DOES Braunschweig
The system administrators at the computing centre of the technical Universit?Braunschweig kapituliert on Friday of yesterday before the effects of an unknown Spam load and the Spam and virus filters DO deactivated. After "quite controversially gef?ten service discussion" the responsible persons decided that their setting obligation, all enamels within f? To deliver days to the Empf?er, priority before the Sch?ingsschutz genius?. For the description of the situation the Admins submitted the following numbers:
"our server park of approx.. 20 systems alone for enamels is overloaded. A "basic load" of zun?st 30,000 rough enamels (Di) on approximately 100,000 enamels expanded (Fr). [... ] Per hour up to 10.000 enamels by the Spam and virus scanners are worked on and set. 98% of it are "unerw?chte" Mails (Spam, viruses) for which we nevertheless a legal setting obligation have."
W?end Mails within the Braunschweiger of computer network to be still normally set, m?en themselves external Mail Empfanger with the advice to manage, them should e-Mail-Anh?e after M?ichkeit only after R?sprache with the sender?nen and otherwise a local virus scanner use and this at least once t?ich update.
The University of Braunschweig is not threatened as only ones of the Spam oversupply: Already since past week the computing centre of the free Universit?Berlin blocks perforce all Mails with potenziell gef?lichen Attachments, and as reported the E-Mail supply of the Federal Government in the digital M sags?.
It d?te indisputablely its that the Admins of the?rfluteten computing centres does not act differently k?en, but a deichbruch as in the Braunschweiger IT landscape tr? surely not to the Abschwellen of the Spam wave, rather to their further growth with (hps/c't)
...is to inform the students how to install their own software, like Spam Assassin. That would distribute the processing to the people who actually would use it.
Read journal when you are not understand
> Is this the end of email?
:), so I think that responibility is the key to keeping email working. Adding some numbers (*sigh*) helps guard against random address guessing.
Yes. When one university decides to stop filtering SPAM the entire world's infrastructure has effectively been shut down. Oh wait... no.
My UIC account gets NO spam (because I don't give it to anyone
Anyway I don't see anyone stopping you from using your own SPAM filter. Let's not blow this out of proportion, please.
My other car is first.
The spammers have already won.
But what about the email servers?
Maybe they should just blacklist the most common spam and virus adresses by subnet then filter on a lower percentage. It would seem that if they got rid of china or some other area like what happend recently with spain, it would send a message to those networks to stop things and bear some of the weight.
When you look at it, it just resembles a lose-lose situation more everyday.
Excuse me? One university gives up on spam filtering for questionable reasons and you declare death of email? Weird, I still do most of my communication via email. My servers all run spam marking services and my client filters out the junk as soon as it's retrieved.
:)
Of course more bandwidth is wasted on spam mails, but since I don't see much of it, it doesn't bother me so much.
What do you propose to use instead of email? instant messaging? Talk about waste of time
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
Is this the beginning of the end of e-mail?
I seriously doubt e-mail will ever die. It's FAR too convenient to just give up on. Even if it comes to the worst case scenario where you have to whitelist everyone who wants to send you e-mail, it'll never go away.
Here at the university where I am a sysadmin, we get approx. 100K emails per day and we have no problem pushing them through spamassassin on a single server with dual 2.8 xeon processors. How in the world could this place possibly need 20 servers to process this much mail?!
Wait, don't tell me.
1: They refused to use blacklists to cut the load.
2: They refused to publish SPF records and use SPF to block all the email forged to look like it's from their domain, significantly cutting the spam load.
3: They used one of those "commercial-grade" virus/spam mail scanners that's designed to use entirely Bayesian scanning without ever setting time-outs on the generated rules, and which was written for "completeness", not speed.
4: They forgot to set up a honeypot machine to auto-block spam domains.
6: They underbudgeted for the servers to actually do the mail handling, forgetting to set up up appropriate MX records with good fallover behavior, so when any of their served domain's MX record listed machine blinked that entire domain went offline.
7: They're using MS Exchange SMTP servers, which bog down incredibly under load, especially if you run any separate service such as spam processing.
translation to en
"Because of the legal obligation to deliver all mail and of the delay time exceeding critical 5 days(!)"
Is it just me or is this another ridiculous law? The University is providing free email services to those that are students at this establishment and they obviously need to filter out spam in order to be able to offer this service with there current hardware requirements. Spam is a legitimate problem and people that are offering free email services should be allowed to attempt to filter it as it can be extremely taxing on a busy mailserver. They can filter the spam without being intrusive or breaking privacy laws so I see no reason that it should be prevented by law.
Personally, if it were my universtiry, I would prefer they started to use a RTBL. The fact of the matter is, if the likely spam isn't sorted out first, I have to try to discern the stuff entirely by hand. And although I can easily pick out Viagra ads, I have relatives and the occasional acquaintence who send mail that looks awfully like spam. Didn't want to type a subject. Used "hello" as the subject. Didn't configure their mail client properly, so their "replyto" looks crazy. Without some initialy spam filtering, I would miss at least some of these -- in fact, I'd probably miss more mail with no filtering than with a judicious blackhole in front of me.
Love or hate SPEWS and other kinder, gentler RTBLs, they're better than the present choice. It would certainly reduce the load of these email servers to where it could be more easily handled. And, if nothing else, they couldbe used to prioritize mail. Use Spam Assassin or something else to do some initial tag and filter so that mail coming from Asian IPs or originating from mail servers on cable/ADSL networks gets put into the "slow" processing queue while everything else gets sent down the faster pipe.
</spouting with little to no knowledge>
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
How bad do you really need the spam countries on the internet?
Spammer's disregard for the public good will force us to either put them all in guantanamo or move to email v2.0 . Either way, they'll be completely shut down.
The students and other users of their mail system will just have to use their own spam filters now.
It's not the end of the world. There's a few good spam filters for outlook and outlook express, and some really awesome free ones for linux/unix.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Is this the beginning of the end of e-mail?
As we know it? I could only hope so. Nothing's gonna change, tho, until one of the many proposed methods of sender authetication is adopted as industry standard. But I'm not holding my breath.
I get so much spam everyday in my work account, that I'm not even annoyed anylonger. I've come to accept it as a fact of life on the internet... ain't that sad? At least with such a large amount of sample e-mail, my Popfile hasn't had a false positive/false negative in months.
No sig
This kind of shutdown is only going to encourage spammers to send out even more junk mails.
Now they know that most servers will eventually not able to cope up with the traffic, they might as well send out randomly-generated '@domain.com' spams until the admin gave in.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Makes you wonder doesn't it? Imagine how quickly it would get legistlated into oblivion if goverment IT departments around the world suddenly had no email filters. They'd probably call it terrorism...
Hey Ralsky, how'd ya like to visit Guantanamo?
Like all questions posed in Slashdot's blurbs, the answer is NO! This is one university we are talking about. Count them: one. Hope that answers your question. Bye now.
www.spamgourmet.com has always worked well for me. Give your adress to whom you want, receive just as much mail from them as you want.
No, but its one more nail in the coffin..
Something has to be done soon or email just wont be practical to have. Between Spam and viruii its overloading a lot of comanines network feed and servers..
And don't forget the cost of having to maintain antispam and antiviral solutions..
I know personally where I'm at, we are hitting over 2/3 of all email is spam/virus. ( i hear we drop 10k a day from the black hole list alone )
At home its 98%...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One would think that even spammers would realize that if things go too far, businesses might not carry emails at all anymore.
I mean, even parasites usually try to not kill the host.
*sigh*
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. -- Ferenc Mantfeld
I run Exim with an ACL extension called Exiscan, which runs SpamAssassin and virus checker during the SMTP dialogue.
Rejected mails thus don't generate any undeliverable bounce messages to fill up the local mail queue, and the sender gets an immediate response.
Having gone through German, I find that WorldLingo.com returns a much more accurate translation than Altavista.
We shut off our email filters too. No need for them now that we go through Postini (http://www.postini.com). They filter the spam before it hits your server, then give each user power to customize their filters and view caught messages.
University capitulates. /. visitors break down apache server. Oh .. i mean IIS server.
11 1101 1011111 0100 000 110 1011111 0101 10 01 1011111 101 1 011 1011111 0 1111 11 111 1011111 101
Aber es ist nicht gut... ;)
Yeah, just after Microsoft goes bankrupt and we all stop jacking off to pr0n.
thanks to spamgourmet.
Maybe there should be an n-monthly day on which spam-filters are disabled. That way the public may realize the extent of the spam problem. Can you expect that they know it when they only get a few spams because all the rest is blocked at the server?
I took four years of German in high school, and what do I have to show for it?
The Central Mail Server has been clogged up by an overload of Spam/Virii and has been interfereing with governmental affairs. The rest is people talking about non-delivery reports. If you really care, find a German speaking geek in your life, or struggle with the Babel Fish.
Read journal when you are not understand
"My 100'000 e-mails a day isn't toppling the system... it's the 10 other millions, and I don't send nearly that much"
The problem is never with you, remember?
Why dont these people start using reverse DNS to MX record verification? It checks to make sure the machine sending you email has a real reverse DNS that matches their MX record. If not, it disconnects. Combine that with the real time black hole list and you'll never see spam again! This mail package does it: Icewarp
The university probably doesn't pay much but there are many unemployed American citizens such as me who would welcome the opportunity to visit Germany and solve your spam problems. All the facts of this article suggest the problem is in implementation, not in technical feasiblity.
set up a SPAM filter; send all filtered SPAM to Senators/Representatives who voted *for* the CANSPAM bill.
Inform them that they can stop receiving your forwarded SPAM when they enact legislation which puts an effective stop to it.
I'll second that. Spamgourmet is nice, I get no spam... :)
Anyone know the specifications of the 20 servers they were using? 100,000 messages isn't that much. Five day delays? Did I read that right?
On a side note, slashdotters now have an excuse for not reading TFA: "I don't speak German!"
I go to Penn State, but since the university feels it has to protect dumb windows users from themselves, I cannot even send or recieve email with the subject, "Hi such-and-such"(Try explaining to a friend overseas who has almost never in her life touched a computer, in her language, why she can't send you mail with that subject) because it might contain the bagle virus. This is the same university that put in a firewall because supposedly too many people on campus had a butt-load of viruses and spyware.
Yet this same university loves to publish my email address on the web; ensuring I get tons of spam(some even in Chinese!)
I hate when the community at large has to pay for the transgressions of a few slimeballs and the idiocy of some(not even most) gullible windows users.
In addition, I have two accounts that I use regularly -- one that I give to everyone (web registration forms, etc) where I don't care about spam, and another one that is personal and I only give to close friends. Guess which one gets more spam? That's right. My personal account gets about 150 per day. My "don't care" account gets like 6 per day. They have both been active for many years.
...just my 2 gil.
shut up, karma whore. no double +5 funny for you!
Side from that, we could bring back burning at the stake and other tortures for spammers. Here is a fitting idea - for those who are male and send out penis enlargement ad's, make them have sexual reassignment surgery and give 'em big boobs! They should have to check in yearly to make sure they are still female and with big boobs.
98% spam and virus's? Damn. Think that the mail is coming from campus.
Outside world:
Block direct contact to the mail servers, use an upstream MX record.
Inside world:
authenticated SMTP.
7: They're using MS Exchange SMTP servers, which bog down incredibly under load, especially if you run any separate service such as spam processing.
Nah, it's sendmail:$ dig -t MX tu-bs.de
[...]
tu-bs.de. 172738 IN MX 10 rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de.
$ telnet rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de smtp
Trying 134.169.9.40...
Connected to rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de ESMTP Sendmail 8.11.1/8.11.1; Mon, 24 May 2004 04:00:51 +0200 (METDST)
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
They won't switch away from email all together. They will get a free yahoo or hotmail address. I mean, it would be less spam.
Evolution or ID?
I would say this is probably not the end of email, nor is it the end of the Internet as a whole. However, it is probably the end of the protocols currently used to send and receive email.
I believe that spam is ultimately a security issue, because it slows down systems and creates problems for users and system administrators. Sometimes, security problems are caused by buffer overruns and other programming errors. However, in this case, I think the entire protocol is faulty. It may have worked wonderfully before spammers, but it's time to introduce something new that will make it extremely difficult to send spam.
I don't know exactly how the new protocol needs to look. But I have some ideas. Paying for "postage" is not one of them, as I think it is a very bad idea. Unless some payment system could be set up whereby the recipient of the mail receives the payment, not some 3rd party, like Microsoft, which would profit incredibly from garbage spam mails going all over the place. In fact, if that were the setup, then each recipient could state a price per email and/or per kilobyte of the mail message for receiving an email from a source, which the source would pay to the recipient as postage. A whitelist could be set up to allow certain senders, like one's friends, family, coworkers, etc., to send emails without paying the recipient. A blacklist could be set up to disallow all emails from specific senders and/or domains, as we have today, and if you read further in this post, you'll see my ideas for making sure that addresses are not spoofed. But I digress...
Perhaps first of all, the mail headers need to include digital signatures based on the source and destination domain names, email addresses, and other identifying information that is unique to each email sent. To avoid address spoofing, for example, people sending junk with a 'yahoo' or 'hotmail' address, when in fact it originates elsewhere, each such domain would have a private key, which upon sending, would be used in the computation. A valid signature could not be computed when the address is spoofed, and so all spammers would need to use their own valid domain name. Further, the need to make computations would make it more costly for spammers to send mail in high volumes. The algorithm should be designed so that recipients of email will have a much lower cost to verify the key. Further, the signature system could, should, and would be used to verify that each bit of the contents of the email, including all attachments, arrived correctly and without being tampered with or corrupted in transit.
The whole thing about them being legally obligated to deliver mail is the silliest thing I've ever heard. Leave it to the Germans to enact such a law.
Better to just not deliver ANY mail than to deal with that requirement.
the numbers dont add up, Loads of people have already raised the issue about the fact that 20 servers ( even decently mid spec single CPU machines ) will handle 100k emails an hour ( about 80 emails per min per machine is very achieveable ... ).
But there are some other issues you need to look at, with these emails not being scanned - do you know how much of storage you need to have online to have a mailstore this size and developing by the hour at 100k msgs ? not everyonce will use pop3 to get their emails, and not all the users will check email every day. Were talking about a very very large and very well setup Mail Store for this kind of volume. What about network bandwidth ?
A few basic things can reduce the work of those servers : Duplicacy level across these emails is going to be very high - all 100k emails per hour cannot be unique, there are going to be loads and loads of dupes, that dont even need to be scanned.
Creating a small database in-house with bad MailSender's list ( kind of like an in house RBL ), and flushing that list on an 6 hour interval will slow the inflow as well to quite an extent - in some tests done, i have seen it go down by almost 15 - 18% when there is a heavy load. Since most 'real' mailservers tend to retry, even if a genuine mailserver is blacklisted for 6 hours - it wont make much of a difference, however most 'hijacked PC's sending spam' dont have any retry or resending mechanism - and will just not be able to send into your server.
Another issue that helps stem the tide of bad email is to check for Virus infections before checking for spam. A lot of cases the tides of mail coming in can be virus infections ( which are easier and faster to check against - compared to rules + logic based spam checkers ).
However, all this is said and done without knowing of what system and what kind of a setup they use, there is no way anyone can really know what happened and why.
In the end, classic case for Linux and Unix based technologies to come into the frame I think.
The ONLY conditions I can see where there might be "legal obligations" to deliver all E-mail traffic is where the servers, and other university resources, are taxpayer (read: publically) funded.
Is that what's going on here? If not, it seems to me it would be a clear case of "their servers, their bandwidth, their rules," and that they could run things any way they bloody well pleased.
That's certainly the way it is with privately-owned systems.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante (*) lack of an
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(*) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(*) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(*) No-lists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(*) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(*) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Joking aside, it boils down to economics. Spam is profitable. If something is profitable, people will do it. Selling drugs is profitable, and the war on some drugs hasn't changed that. The answer to spam (and drugs) is not to try and stop them, but to make doing them unprofitable.
What makes spam profitable is the presence of people on the internet who are SO incredibly stupid that they fall for it. (See Junkie loves his spam) Remove them, and you shoot spam through it's purtid heart. I can think of several methods of doing do:
- If you respond to spam, you've probably got shitloads of viruses on your computer. Beyond any shadow of a doubt some of them are spamming people. If you ISP detects lots of mystery traffic from you on known virus ports, you're given one warning. Then you get kicked off without ceremony and not allowed to reconnect until you can prove to them that all computers using your connection are malware-free. No more malware, no more spam zombies.
- (You, the ISP) Send test-spams. Specify in the header that it is NOT a real spam so you don't get blacklisted. Anyone who responds to them loses all services except port 80 until you prove to a professional who visits your house that you know enough not to buy from spam. Do it again and you will never be allowed to use your ISP's mail servers again.
Neither of these can possibly be routed around or hacked by spammers, because they are not involved in any part of the process. If you are not in the habit of perpetuating malware with your computer, you needn't worry of getting caught up in it all. Neither of these requires a major invasion of your privacyI agree that SMTP needs a makeover, but what to replace it with is still very much an open question.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
this is in no way the end of e-mail... more like the first sign of a pending evolution. we're so tied to e-mail and instant communication, that the world requires e-mail, and i'm sure a much more secure e-mail protocol will be coming out in the near future. as soon as sendmail/postfix adopt such an advancement, spammers around the world will be looking for another line of work.
i know i wouldn't mind paying my registrar a bit more each year to register my domain as a legitimate mail service...
It seems that they've decided to provision potentially 50x their existing disc space for email (as 98% of the email is currently spam, which is presumably filtered out at the moment), instead of deploying additional resources for filtering before it gets to the users.
Good luck with that approach! If their primary constraint is budgetary, as it would seem, it would make more sense to invest *more* in filtering so that the crap didn't get to users' mailboxes where it will doubtless stay indefinitely in some cases.
Note: I'm assuming that, because they have some apparent requirement that all mail gets delivered, that they cannot effectively enforce email quotas that would result in non-delivery of email.
Don't you see? We stand to lose everything!
> /dev/null.
Report that all emails are stored in an infinitismally small location that only future, advanced technologies will be able to restore email upon request. Requests will be queued until the technology has been developed.
spamd is a new approach to blocking spam. Its called greylisting. It rejects all email with a temporary failure notice in the hopes that the large volume spam senders don't have the resources to wait 30mins and send the same email again. Apperently this method works quite well and uses little resources.
not to exploit the 'imagine a beowulf...' cliche.. but how would clustering email servers help this? has it already been tried?
Where I work, we handle a couple million emails a day pretty decently with about 6 email servers. We definitely feel the "crunch" during spam blasts, but we can usually handle it. 20 servers unable to handle 100,000 emails is pretty lame. Seriously, upgrade those Windows 3.1 MTAs!
The MTA's work is relatively light compared to what anti-spam software must do. This is especially true of SpamAssassin. While it does have some advantages over its competition, SpamAssassin is extremely resource intensive. Firstly, SpamAssassin is not written in fast C/C++ but Perl. Every email is sent through zillions of Perl regex rules. Then there is the Perl implementation of the Bayesian test, which really bogs down when an email auto-learned. Then there are the various (optional) network lookup tests: several RBLs, Pyzor/Razor/DCC ... each email can eat up a lot of resources even if you bypass the startup overhead by running spamd.
I have also seen situations where SpamAssassin was not correctly respecting the maximum child spawn limit. Since spamd is a fairly heavyweight process, the server started swapping and throughput plunged.
Such heavy overhead is not a essential part of anti-spam software. Something NOT written in Perl nor any "interpreted" language, something with a smaller footprint, will be much, much faster. I wonder how many people have switched to dspam for this reason?
How about buying a bigger server? But I guess that this not German mentality since everything has to be cheap. Lars
Attention, moderators: A robotranslation is not +3, Informative. It's -1, Karma Whore. We can use Babblefish for ourselves, thank you very much.
Now a real translation by a human being into real English, that deserves a few mod points.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
OK, you could tell the end users to find their own tools and just cope.
However, I work in a large organisation, and with a 98% spam ratio, the mail infrastructre would need to be much larger (and more expensive!) than it actually neeeds to be. Let alone the (*&&^$@# junk traffic and bounces caused by auto-responses to forged addresses. Plus we have a significant number of staff who are clueless who would be excluded from communicating effectively because they do not have the time or skills to learn how to train a spam filter. in such a situation, no-one could no-longer *rely* on email to contact/inform our staff, reducing its value as a tool.
Our email infrastructure already groans under the load each time another Outlook virus arrives.
The hay-stack of spam is probably just as disruptive as false scanner positives.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Does Germany have a law that I'm not familiar with? Email is free not a paid service, why is there some obligation to deliver? Snail mail is normally Govt. run and delivery is what you pay for with a stamp.
No one has to or could guarantee anything for email. With the amount flowing because of SPAM the dropped packets must be astronomical.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Simply discard any email that is of the "obviously bad" sort that grandma could never write. Purify the rest. So...
Bad headers? bitbucket
Bad MIME structure? bitbucket
Windows executable? bitbucket
Java, VBscript, or JavaScript? bitbucket
External image? bitbucket
Stange objects like flash? bitbucket
Add the originating IP
Add the envelope address
Strip unknown HTML tags
Re-compress GIF and PNG images
Convert BMP to PNG
Done! You have an email safe for Outlook Express, you didn't burden the server very much, and you took a huge bite out of the spam.
I use Cashette for my email server. It's free, allows POP access, gives you the ability to activate its systems on other email accounts, and it works by using an authorization system. Basically, if someone isn't on your "authorized" list, then their mail gets put into a special folder. You can either review what's in that folder, or just forget about it. Here's the nifty part... If a spammer REALLY wants to get their message to you, they can pay you for delivery. You set the price, up to $300 for them to get their message to you.
You can get your own account at http://www.cashette.com/
Have fun!
-Phyre
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." -Thom
Is this the beginning of the end of e-mail?
A year ago, I would have laughed this notion off as absurd, but I'm starting to give it more credit. I'm easily dumping 75-100 messages out of my junk folder each day (after a very quick review of the header information). That is so where I can receive maybe 1-5 legitimate emails a day.
I suppose I'll just have to wait for the problem to get worse for everyone else before the world wakes up and realizes the current system is just plain broke.
Being the person that blocks spam is a lose/lose situation. They don't understand how bad the problem is when you do your job right. They complain when spam gets through and complain when legit email gets blocked, but don't want you wasting all your time on it.
I predict that this school will be forced back into filtering spam by their students (customers).
[rant]See, 3 years ago, as spam was beginning to get bad, I began filtering spam on the email system I manage. Over 2.5 years, I developed a rather intensive filter, but since I knew I was not perfect, I had to scan blocked email for false positives. It got to the point I was spending 25% of my time scanning for false positives and the boss didn't like that. He also didn't want me to spend time trying to figure out how to set up Spam Assassin. (I'm not a Linux guru. Sorry!) The board didn't want to spend the money on a purchased system and didn't want me wasting my time with spam. They didn't think it was a problem so they told me to just stop blocking spam. My boss told them that spam was a BIG problem, but they never saw it so they didn't believe him. I asked my boss 10X "Are you sure you want me to stop blocking spam? They won't like the results." He confirmed. I stopped blocking spam and about 50,000 additional spams per week came flooding into the system. The 50,000 were what was being blocked previously. I was flooded with phone calls until everyone realized what was happening. Then, just 2 weeks ago, I was instructed by the board to go back to my filtering, but only spend 30 minutes a day on it. RIIIIGGGHHHHHTTTTT! Ever try scanning for legit email among the trash, adjusting filters to make it better and taking calls and emails from people that want you to be sure an email is blocked and only spend 30 minutes a day on it? I managed to put together a Spam Assassin box and it blocks 10,000 per week, but there's a lot that doesn't get blocked. I don't know enough about it to make it better.[/rant]
But why is the rum gone?
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Fucking retarded
Cut off your nose to spite your face ( which always seemed somehow wrong to me... )
Fucking retarded.
Now, I'm not an admin on their campus ( which is a damn shame for them ), but talk about being just this side of the shortbus. ( Note that I read the bable, but ended up even more confused that simply trying my hand at it without it ). My pathetic little email server ( pII233, 128megs of ram, qmail with qmailscanner, clamscan and spamassassin ), is able to process your standard piece of spam in about 1 second. Approx. Now, I don't know what software they were using, but I'd be willing to hazard it was exchange.
All this just goes to show one thing: GERMANS LOVE DAVID HASSLEHOFF.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Dumb question, but someone mentioned the odd spellings these days... ba|\|a|\|a = banana. How many people spell that way? Why not tell the spam filter that more than one word using ^[A-Z] (for English language) has an increased likelihood of being spam?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
A great solution for my clients to reduce server load has been to outsource spam filtering to a third party (we recommend Frontbridge). They have an amazing filtering system that has to this date never had a false positive. Once the service is up you don't even have to think about spam anymore except the occasional one that gets through.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
You know, one day at work (in a data center of a global fortune 500 company in the bay area) someone just showed up one day with a delivery of a half million dollar IBM mainframe. It was our new email server. Too bad they didn't ask me, because I would have told them that all their email could be handled by a few PC's with ease, but they didn't. The decision was made by top level managment and I (and 90% of the IT department) was totally in the dark until it just showed up at the door! (How much you want to bet somebody was getting kickbacks or eyeing a cozy job at IBM)
Anyhow, after that I would believe anything. How much you want to bet all 20 of those email servers are high end sun sparc stations?
Leave port 80 open and the malware will just start to use that. Spam is a biological phenomenon, and most any action designed to kill it will merely apply a selection force to the ecosystem, stepping the arms race up another notch. Frankly, spammers aren't going away until we get some kind of cryptographically secure digital trust system that can raise the cost of sending spam, and designing such a system is a Hard Problem (which might make an interesting slashdot thread).
This deserves a -1, Asshat...
Spamhole.com does the same thing as well, but with fewer hoops to jump through.
If I understand this spam problem correctly, why do they (ISPs) filter incoming mail when logically they should be filtering outgoing mail? The way I see it is spammers hit unsuspecting network vendors (Chinese, Brazilian, Korean etc.) who are all to glad to have netted a hefty account until a week or two later they find themselves blacklisted all over the world. The damage is done and the spammer has already moved on to another ISP.
If email were channelled, filtered, throttled and who knows what else on its way out instead of in, spammers would be discouraged or at least slowed down to a snail's pace. A trustworthy registry of ISPs using this technique could be created and providers could choose to receive mail from this list only. Spam has become a world wide plague and requires a global effort. Does this make any sense, anyone?
If you really want to make spam unprofitable, don't prevent people from clicking on the links. Instead, make everyone do it.
Perhaps they're running Exchange or something over there. I would think that 100,000 emails, distributed to 20 different machines, would amount to 5,000 emails apiece. How could this possibly be a substantial increase in load over a period of _five days_ for just about anything?
... but Germany is a pretty modern place, and my desktop machine (an AMD 1800+ system, which cost about $600 total in parts when I first built it) could handle the kind of load their servers should be seeing. They should be able to get access to enough power to deal with the mail load they're getting, or they're running on ten year old machines and are refusing to spend a cent on upgrading.
Going a bit further, it would mean these machines were blowing at least 17 real seconds processing each email, if each machine were performing only one scan at a time. Whose filter takes 17 seconds to process and scan one mail? I know that DNS lookups can take time, but doing regexps on text documents certainly doesn't take much by comparison.
Now, it's possible that they only have three or four of these 20 machines acting as the front line MX servers for the system, with most of the others just storing subsets of the mail, and running POP/IMAP to deliver to users. It would mean five times the load would be on these machines, but geez... 5 x piddly is still near piddly.
I've worked for a company dealt with way, way more than 10,000 mails per hour (a tenth of what the uni is taking more than five days to handle) and delivery time for that network was under 30 seconds--with only four servers acting for both incoming and outgoing mail.
It sounds like they simply must have done something critically wrong somewhere in their network design that's acting as a severe bottleneck, or they are using REALLY old/slow machines to toss mail.
I can only come to the conclusion that they're just flat out refusing to spend money to upgrade the equipment because the thing that's overloading what they have is spam. The only way that will ever work for them is if spam mysteriously disappears entirely from their network--which isn't bloody likely to happen in the real world anytime soon.
ACs don't get karma.
This can be unrelated but it raises a concern of mine... the prospects of email in the long run or future.
For years email has served us. It has delivered time after time and is a global-wide method of communication. Yet... despite of the wonders of email alone, we are seeing an ever-increasing amount of spam floating around... a bunch of which that creeps in when your filter has been well-trained.
What I'd like to know is... can we reinvent the wheel? Is it possible to reinvent email with the purpose of ending all spam as we know it? Time and time again have I looked through random spam and found that they were delivered even tho it wasn't addressed directly to my email address. And sometimes, I see 'From' fields with my email address on it.
I feel disappointed at how email has turned out given all the methods and tools out there to combat spam... It makes me wonder if we should abandon email altogether and go with something akin to instant messaging.
~ Old Warriors Society
Everyone needs to be registered with their mail server with the governing body (similar to the domain name idea), say for $100 per IP. It is not that expensive if you really need that... But, prohibitive for spammer... Yes, it makes home run email server more expensive... But, you cannot get a domain name for free anyway. Why should we expect email server to be free? It may be the solution to get the economy of spamming right again.
See, I got a perfectly free *.mine.nu DNS name. Dynamic DNS, baby. Also, it's *not* prohibitive to a spammer. They run a business, and by the time it gets whacked as a bad server, they've already made the appropriate SPAM runs and gotten away with the money anyway.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are graphics format exploits, including a
recent one for Internet Explorer using BMP files.
Lossless graphics re-compression is dirt cheap
compared to SpamAssasin, Bayesian filters, and
Apple's word vector thing.
Rule: Do the cheap and obvious filtering, plus
the filtering needed to protect Microsoft junk.
I get legit email with HTML tags and even images.
Often this lets me know the sender has no taste,
but sometimes it is justified. You used an italic
font to quote me; that doesn't work in plain text.
Bold, underlining, and fixed-width characters can
all be justified. The sort of formatting you'd see
in a man page is perfectly legit.
...e-mail has what nothing else has - everyone you know will have an email address. They might not have program foo or support protocol bar, but they will have e-mail. Even assuming you could create a better system, there'd have to be e-mail to Supermail(TM) and back gateways for many years to come.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This isn't even the beginning of the end of email. It's simply becomming less and less workable to run a single mail server system with a large amount of users. Small time mail servers aren't targeted by spammers. Universities are heavily targeted because there are lots of users all going to a common domain.
It's the same reason users of major ISPs are more likely to be probed for vulerabilities.
I've found the method of filtering based on the "Click-Me" domains to be the most effective with virtually no false positives (zero is a realistic number).
I've found that setting up a secure public mail system is cake. Mercury Mail is free and handles well. A single check box set by default is all it takes to keep it from being an open relay. Students of the university could probably do rather well offering their own e-mail services to students. Mercury Mail's filtering system is quite robust.
MM supports IMAP/POP3/SMTP and alternate ports as well as SSL on all them. Adding a web-based front end also isn't that difficult if you know what you're doing. There's actually one built in and a more robust version coming.
I already have a few hundred users on Indie-Mail and the amount of bandwidth used per day is pretty negligable.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Make your boss happy, and block on these three DNS based lists: dsbl.org, spamhaus.org, dnsbl.org. Everything coming from IP addresses in these range is basically garantueed not to contain false positives. It'll clear your inbox quite effectively. (I'm one of the volunteers helping out dsbl.org, so feel free to mail me with questions)
-John
If required they can also set a spam level on the mail server in a MySQL user/account database to automatically delete mail over the specified threshold (for accounts receiving oodles of obvious spam).
It has a nice balance between performance, security, and leaving most of the control in the hands of the users. We haven't faced extreme loads but it hasn't even raised an eyebrow over the load so far. Most importantly, no unhappy usres complaining of missing emails...
Q.
Insert Signature Here
The measured UBEs over a 3 moth period were 172,887 - only for their top-25 most spammed employees!
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
How can you know you've had no false positives.
Have you personally reviewed the 2.9M messages which were filtered out... if you have then i'd question the value of your filtering.
I know i've occasionally had false positives and i get nowhere near your message volume. My personal favorite is the UK paypal-esque service NoChex which sends emails with the subject line "YOU'VE GOT CASH!!"...
How would you send program[-fragments] and other non-[A-Z] mails? Tagging [^A-Z] as likely spam could wreck havoc in many mail settings.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...It's not that great alone.
Greylisting forces a delay between when a spam is originally sent, and when it's finally accepted. Using existing systems such as Razor, DCC, you can use that small window of time to block a lot of crap.
The best spam defense is in layers. SpamAssassin and Mimedefang can bring a huge number of simple spam and virus filtering techniques together in a way that is very, very hard to defeat.
I've seen this happen in my local University too.
Take a university that has thousands of people actively using email, and thousands of computers, probably a hundred of which function as mail server. Now, decide that "we need a central mail server to filter viruses and spam". Take a few useless machines lying in the computer center, and make them the mail server that's supposed to replace the hundred you had previously. Then slow down the new mail server by applying every concievable virus and spam filtering.
What do you get? Incredibly slow service (sometimes mails get stuck for hours or more in the queue), single point of failure, and officially-mandated false positives (noone in the university can avoid them). AND, you still get a lot of spam.
Computer centers must know that if they want to centralize a service that was previously decentralized (different departments and individual running their own mail servers and filters), they must be prepared. Prepared to handle the load (Google had to buy 100,000 machines to handle their load!), prepared to handle the humans who use their service, and prepared to handle exceptions (a person or department that doesn't want the centralized filtering). Often, these computer centers don't think of these issues in advance, causing things like described in this article.
"We can use Babblefish for ourselves, thank you very much."
We can also subscribe to cable and get CNN and MSNBC and FOXNEWS ourselves, but most people don't and that is why major news needs to be posted to the local networks....
It is about informing the masses buddy, not karma whoring. You'd be surprised the number of people who didn't read something because it wasn't translated. Most people don't sit on their computers all hours of the day and night reading slashdot and other various important websites. Most people just don't have time for it.
If posting this translation rewards some sort of bonus, thats even better. Just more incentive for people to post information for the public to easilly read.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Since one of the large virus outbreaks last falls, I've been at 300+ emails a day, mostly virus, spam second. It just doesn't fade away. Bogofilter does a good job, and it's doable to weed out most of the useful stuff from the junk, but it's still much more timeconsuming than it used to be.
My solution is to take important projects away from email to alternative forums like Wiki's, SourceForge and the like.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Spamd and other means for "tarpitting" the calling SMTP are another great tool to be used in combination with RBLs and bayesian filters.
It's a strategy in layers:
A very useful and free mail email scanning tool that is fast & GPL. (Please visit the sourceforge link if at all possible).
Mailscaner at Sourceforge
Mailscanner website
Suppose they had some scheme to detect spam which involved taking the equivalent of a vector product with known "spam" emails (and doubling the score if "Nigerian" was in it), then it might take quite some time to filter all of it. And they might be sharing some files over network to slow it down. And they might use triple filters/servers for filtering spam, their homebrewn filter, and viruses.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
The law in Germany is clear: If you take on a Message for someone else you must deliver. Payment is not required.
One alternative is not to take the message in the first place. That is you have to filter right inside the smtp Server and reject the message with an error code.
Other alternative is to use IMAP and filter the mail into different folder.
An other alternaive is an opt-in service.
The last option is very successful in Germany.
With Regards
Martin
It doesn't say breaking down after 100k emails a day. Everyone here knows most mail servers can do that on junk hardware in a day(yes, Even exchange can do it).
It sounds more like they are having problems when they start reaching 100k messages in the queue. Anyone who's dealt with tracking a large number of small files across a file system knows that there can be slow downs (not that there aren't solutions to those, but they may not have been able to spend the time to address the problem since they've been 'fighting fires'). When my incoming postfix/amavis/spamassassin systems get 100k or so mails in their queues on ext3 file systems, they start behaving badly too. We addressed the 'fire' problem by throwing more front end servers at it while we take time to rethink our file systems where the queues reside. We'll get the the luxury of a few weeks to address it with other hardware before we start getting unacceptable delivery delays again (for us, thats
Universities don't always have the money to throw hardware at a problem like this or are willing to give their often student supported IT administration the benefit of the doubt that 'we need $20k (euros, lira, beads, whatever) to buy some hardware to roll a better solution'.
Yes, I'd be surprised too if they mean '100k emails a day and we bog down' . . . I just seriously doubt that is what they mean. Maybe they are stopping their spam/virus processing just to clear their backlog. Maybe its not that they aren't receiving it & spam processing it fast enough; maybe its their backend server that is taking it all in just can't keep up. I mean, if they've got 20 spam/virus receivers that are getting the job done and trying to hand off to one fat exchange box that isn't keeping up then their queues are going to grow on those front ends and eventually kill them which makes it look like their spam/virus scanners are causing the delays.
Then again, they could be a bunch of retards and everyone is right that they don't know how to run even a low volume mail server . . . but somehow I doubt it . . .
Because once a solution becomes commercial, the spammers get hold of it and work out how to modify their spam so that it gets through.
Just turn the mail servers off completely. Once you hit the 98% crap level, the service is completely useless anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
1) ISPs are fighting for market share. They need that 20% of the population that is retarded enough to buy from spammers.
2) If you kick people off for buying from spammers, they will go to some other ISP who will welcome them with open arms.
3) Even without e-mail these idiots will find a way to buy from spammers.
4) As much as we would like an entrance exam for using the internet, it will never happen. It's also an extraordinarily arrogant thing to even consider, you insensitive clod.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Your idea should be marked at -1 stupid.
Rejecting spams potentially creates a bounce message which is just joe-jobbing some innocent 3rd party.
If you don't know what joejobbing is, it is when someone gets 100,000 bounces from a spam run because people thought it was l33t to rejects spams.
NewsFlash! Rejecting spams is a dumb idea.
Your idea has a fatal flaw. Almost all mailing list traffic would be rejected under your scheme (ie LKML, p5p, Parrot, etc)
Maybe because they are German?
Why not sign email, at the mail routers and gateways.
Email from large organizations could then be given priority (you'd know who it was by the signiture).
If an organizations starts spamming remove there signiture from the trust list.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Try http://www.livejournal.com/users/cinquero/11478.ht ml!
We have 2 Solaris/Sendmail boxes as our mail gateway and about a thousand Exchange boxes(and admins to support them) on the internal network.
In this case, they also have 2 gateway machines:
rzcomm5.rz.tu-bs.de and rzcomm15.rz.tu-bs.de
Having said that, the spam processing itself can be slow, especially if the machines have to query external hosts or processes asking if a mail looks like spam.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"Your idea should be marked at -1 stupid.
Rejecting spams potentially creates a bounce message which is just joe-jobbing some innocent 3rd party."
That's exactly what he would avoid. The SPAM is rejected at delivery, hence there's no need for a bounce message.
No real-time filter:
Spam server -> Real server
->SENDING EMAIL
<-MESSAGE ACCEPTED
Real server -> JoeJobbed server
->SENDING BOUNCE
<-BOUNCE ACCEPTED
With real-time filter:
Spam server -> Real server
->SENDING EMAIL
<-MESSAGE REJECTED
And had it been non-spam:
Legitimate server -> Real server
->SENDING EMAIL
<-MESSAGE REJECTED (mis-id as spam)
And the legitimate server would send a "delivery failure: rejected as spam" to the user.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There'll be an update this summer but the current version can run Clamav and check Spamhaus for blacklisting.
All written in Perl so it should run fairly easily on everything.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
When the Communications Decency Act was being argued in the Supreme Court, opponents of the act contended that a "technologic fix" was sufficient, i.e., filters. This was disingenuous, but served the argument to overturn the law. Immediately afterwards, the same lawyers set to work suing libraries and universities who had the temerity to install filters. What is needed is a rejection of this idea that the internet be a wild west of no laws, with the burden of protection on the individual. The telephone spam problem was solved with a LAW (shudder), not some kludgy filter, vigilante blacklist, "Bayesian analysis" or other wankoid spy-vs-spy nonsense.
And will also strip out things other than HTML tags. Maybe nobody ever sends emails with code in through your server...
I run my own webservers, with mail service etc. /dev/null as most spam is sent to madeupname@domain.com
1 good thing was to make sure every user has a defined email address, or alias to their username. That means I can send a good 85% of mail straight to
The rest of the spam is due to people leaving their addresses in plain site (on web pages etc) and not having virus free computers.
I also run MailScanner to remove viruses, before the user can get to them, but I don't use spam assassin, because thats not my problem. The users are, to a large extent, to blame for the amount of spam going through the server, (see above) and I don't see why I should deprive them of their ill-gotten gains !
My spam count in my inbox is virtually zero, the few I do get are forwarded from other servers, but are trivial to delete.
If only people would use personal certificates to identify themselves, then spam filtering would be so much easier.
Actually, spamd is known as a "tarpitting" approach. It uses a PF table of CIDR blocks based on the RBL's to cause the relay servers' mail spools to back up indefinitely.
Greylisting is a newer feature to spamd, providing the ability to whitelist once the sender retransmits after a temporary failure. This feature was added to spamd by Bob Beck on 2/26/04.
``Specify in the header that it is NOT a real spam so you don't get blacklisted.''
Yeah, right. And spammers can't use the same mechanism to avoid getting blacklisted?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's virii, you unsensitive clod!
It says so in my 1337 dictionnary!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Most importantly, no unhappy usres complaining of missing emails...
hahaa... funny!
of course they don't complain about missing email, they never got any, so they don't know what to complain about.
although, sometimes some mail service providers warn their users about possible loss in services or something like that, and i have seen it happen. just recently one local free email provider had warning on their page that it could take up to 5 days to delover some emails, and it actually never delivered emails that i sent to someone who used (back then) their service.
and further more, about a year ago, i got two e-mails that were never deliverd... i only know about those emails because i have set up my account to send a copy of my emails to my cell phone as SMS. (or whatever of it fits in 160 symbols)
No, this is the beginning of the end of journalism.
maybe they need to upgrade or something, where I work we have 2 (two) servers that delete/quaranteen approx 100,000 messages a day, this is not including regular mail...
both are running exchange
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
For your own personal email, go ahead and do that.
The article was about a university server. You'll
piss off every tenured professer, paying student,
and administrator if you completely wipe out the
cutesy stuff people like to send each other.
There's a limited amount of mangling that must be
done to protect the less-clueful users on campus
and reduce storage requirements for spam.
Beyond that, it's up to the user.
What about spam? It may not be destructive, but in USA I can think of several laws that spam violates (wire fraud, CAN-SPAM Act, what else?) --- are we legally required to deliver spam to users?
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Oh, it's *always* the beginning of the end for email. COBOL is dying and Apple is about to tank, I hear.
Quote:
HEC Montréal is Canada's first management school, founded in 1907. More than 11,000 students and 220 professors use HEC's e-mail system every year. Unfortunately, the proprietary e-mail system did not evolve and as the load started to increase, the infrastructure could no longer keep up with requirements.
[snip]
HEC Montréal is a tough e-mail problem: 35,000 users and more than 600,000 spam messages a week.
Read on for the details.
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
I was comparing 802.11b and 802.11g the other day, and wondered why 11Mb fell back to ~2Mb even three feet from my MX4550 base station ...
That's one reason why a straight ^[A-Z] wouldn't work. That would have to be one smart little regexp.
Whoops, sorry; I missed the joke.
It happens sometimes.
(Some of my joke posts are marked troll or off-topic, so it happens to me, too.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
SpamAssassin is horrifically slow. Assuming they are using SA, and maybe a few other filters on top of it, and assuming the machine it's running on isn't the best in the world (say a 10 year old SPARC), I can easily imagine it taking 17 seconds per mail.
SA works pretty well, but JEEZ, is it fucking slow.
I'm still mystified that espionage and anti-terrorism measures, or, from the private sector, vigilantism and lynching hasn't been invoked against spammers. I keep hearing how 90% of all spam is initiated by mere hundreds or thousands of people. Based on the economic costs alone, apparently folks think spammer's lives are worth hundreds of millions of dollars since everyone's willing to do nothing to stop the problem at its source. Not even the US government believes average citizens are worth that much (the average value of a human life for environment cost purposes is ~$6.8M). At what point to would spammers simply become "expendable" given the cost they inflict?
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by dickless here.
Walter Peck: They caused an explosion!
Mayor: Is this true?
Dr. Peter Venkman: Yes it's true.
[pause]
Dr. Peter Venkman: This man has no dick.
1) rm -rf sendmail
2) install qmail
3) ????
4) profit!
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
Okay, A-Z, 0-9, and a period. Then one word of yours wouldn't work, and I'm sure you could set some sort of threshold... x words out of n in a row. But this is all picking nits.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Before I started running mainly my own mailserver, I used to keep an account at gmx.net. At the end of a certain period, they would summary email me stating which messages were marked as SPAM and were to be summarily trashed. If I checked my mail on time, I could catch emails which were not spam and move then to the "inbox" through a webmail interface.
.fetchmailrc: mail the user a summary of marked "spam" messages, with links to mark email such as:
I've considered a similar system (but not had time to configure it yet) where a user could basically flag emails in a file similar to a
-This is spam
-Subscribed (bulkmail that is wanted from a particular domain)
-Known contact (mail wanted from a particular person)
-Keyword/wanted (link to a form in which you could specify an identifier in the mail, such as LUG mails that are all have a prefixed subject).
Legitimate emails could all be tagged with a footer that says:
-Block sender
-Block sending domain
-Block by keyword