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FairUCE - the Smart Email Proxy
Jestrzcap writes "This just posted on Freshmeat: FairUCE (which stands for 'Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email') is an SMTP proxy, running between multiple instances of Postfix, that verifies email by attempting to verify the sender through lookups (a user customized challenge/response). It claims to be able to 'stop a vast majority of spam' without the need for content filters, and 'virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements'."
No way will the spammers ever find a way around this. It's solid!
I've already had problems getting email from my government coworkers with spam validators like this. The military really doesn't like broadcasting who their email servers are... So they regularly get sent to Junk Mail.
If MTA's on the Internet required the forward and reverse DNS lookups to match ~70% of spam (and viruses) would disappear. This requires ISP's to correcty configure their DNS, which unfortunately doesn't happen because people are lazy.
FairUCE looks interesting but I'd be curious if it'd do a better job than milter-sender. About a year ago, before I installed milter-sender, I was receiving about 200-300 spams per day. Since installing milter-sender in March 2004 and adding the spamhaus SBL-XBL checks to sendmail, I've received (checking spam mbox) 1568 spam messages.
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No kidding, I hate people with slanted views.
Doesn't this just create more traffic?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Even though this is an interesting new tool, most e-mail users are tied to whatever backend their ISP supplies, which is a shame... Someone should whip up an end-user desktop version.
Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of the server version though...
One problem with challenge response is that Spammers not only send me spam, but send spam purportedly sent by me. I regularly get error messages about mail that could not be delivered. Now I'll get loads of challenge messages instead.
Of course if my MTA signed my messages with a random key, and the challenge message sent the key back, my MTA could filter out anything I didn't actually send. Unfortunately that requires coordination which the various email/spam task groups do not seem to be capable of.
1) Mobile user sets up notebook at new location and sends mail via the local mail relay.
2) FairUCE on recipient end bounces the mail because it can't find a relationship between the sender and the mail relay.
If the ISP blocks outbound port 25 access, you get a real catch 22. Can't use remote relay becuase of the port block. Can't use local relay because FireUCE will see that there is no relationship to the sender and block the mail.
This is an old idea. It can be implimented with procmail and a little perl. Few people do this, not for lack of tools, but simply because it is a bad idea.
FYI, any time (which is every time) I get a challenge for an email I didn't send, I immediately block the server because that kind of "solution" is nothing short of dropping their spam problem in my lap. Fair warning to anyone who thinks FairUCE is in any way a "Smart" answer to spam.
The only effective spam solution I've currently found is to have expiring email addresses. One easy way to set that up is to use subdomains that don't even resolve after a certain point. So you might have me@2004.example.com good for only three more weeks, or me@amazon.example.com good for as long as Amazon (or your "healthy" girlfriend) doesn't sell you out. You can get tricky, of course, and use subdomains that are not so easily subject to a dictionary attack or guessing.
Have we not established a few basic tenets of the spamademic?
1. Spammers make money by using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth than what they pay for. Stopping spam from entering peoples' inboxes is less than half the problem. 70% or more of all SMTP traffic is UCE and everyone pays for that in higher costs and slower performance regardless of whether they have spam filters in place.
2. The majority of the anti-spam solutions (with the exception of RBLs) including the one related to this article, require extra time, bandwidth and resources on the part of innocent networks to deal with the spam problem. This is a step backwards.
If you want to stop spammers you have to stop them from stealing bandwidth. To date, the ONLY effective solution thus far has been relay blacklisting. This has several added benefits including: stopping propagating of worms/viruses, and forcing ISPs to police the illegal activities of their users and shut down nodes which are spamming through their network.
As an ISP, I have no interest in yet another costly anti-spam solution that I have to install that doesn't address the larger issue of the tons of bandwidth spammers waste on my network and every one in between. This system wastes even more resources by attempting to verify the source of every e-mail in an even more detailed manner than before, so the end result is: more computing resources needed, more bandwidth needed and slower mail service.
No thanks.
I'll patiently wait until the *inevitable* SMTP whitelist scheme that is the only true solution to stopping spam (unless the authorities decide to actually start prosecuting spammers for their crimes).
"If we could just rewrite everybody mailer's with my new widget in illegible Perl or badly written C that breaks several RFC's I've never bothered to read, we will surely stop spam!" I've heard this sort of thing before, every few months for the past 10 years.
There have been dozens of these wildly espoused challenge/response systems over the years. They don't work because users hate them, because vital automated systems such as bill payment and delivery verifications can't get past them. Coupled with "sender pays" systems, they're almost always subverted within short periods and never can or will gain the acceptance of the user community enough to become effective.
Also, wouldn't this just create a rash of false challenges that lead to spamming type material or websites?
Luck favors the prepared, darling.