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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!
"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.
Since you give it to no one, do you have an empty inbox all the time?
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
I bet they run exchange.
"Adding some numbers (*sigh*) helps guard against random address guessing."
Exactly! That's why I require all my users to use multi-case letters, symbols and numbers as their email address. I also require them to change the address every couple of weeks to a value different than any previous value (in case some spammer has managed to brute force it, or the user has leaked it). This has practically eliminated spam and reduced the mail server's storage usage by 99.9% (though the mail server still has to work really hard sending all those 550's).
Does anybody know the filtering methods they were using before they decided to toss everything to wind?
They had a team of 20 monkeys that would read the emails and determine if they were spam. Unfortunately, the monkeys are easily distracted, so anytime they got spam about banannas, they would lose focus. This lead to the backlog.
What? you have never gotten bananna spam before?
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
1 server processes spam, 1 processes viruses, 1 is a DNS server. The other 17 process data for the SETI@home German team.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Yes, but the emphasis wasn't so much the banana as it was where it was inserted.
They probably run NT. :)
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.
No, really both those options sound good.
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
shut up, karma whore. no double +5 funny for you!
What? you have never gotten bananna spam before?
No but I often get asked if I'm satisfied with the size and/or performance of my ba|\|a|\|a
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
Call your elected representatives! Get them to outlaw spam!
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Frequently for stuff that would keep bananas ripe for days without going mushy.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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!
That's a translation? Into what language? :)
What we really need is for our government to take
the word(s) spamassasin literally...
> /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.
Why did you even bother posting that? It's almost incoherent.
all enamels within f? To deliver days to the Empf?er, priority before the Sch?ingsschutz genius?
I'll give you a dollar if you can tell me what that means.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
Their software may be extremely slow, but it's the email equivalent of the Final Solution! Let's take a peak at the algorithm that is responible for slaying more than six million spam messages....
1) Check the headers for a forged "from" address.
2) Check the originating server against a blacklist of known spam servers.
5) "Three, sir!"
3) Check each word of the subject and message body against a list of keywords commonly used in spam.
4) Check each word to make sure it's correctly spelled. This will keep them from fooling the previous filter with randomly misspelled words.
5) Check the message for proper grammer, in case they tacked on a bunch of randomly selected word to beat the previous two filters.
6) Take a five minute coffee break.
7) Send an email to the message's sender asking them, under penalty of perjury, if they are a spammer.
8) When (or if) they eventually reply, forward the original message to the proper account.
it wouldn't happen to be jrockway @imsa.edu would it?
WHOOSH...
Have you had your coffee today?