Slashdot Mirror
Giving Your Greytrapping a Helping Hand
Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Some spam houses have invested in real mail servers now, meaning that they are able to get past greylisting and even content filtering. Recently Peter Hansteen found himself resorting to active greytrapping to put some spammers in their place. The article also contains a list of spam houses' snail mail addresses in case you want to tour their sites."
I've seen an increase in spam that has made it past my gmail spambox in the last week, but I get several thousand spams a day so it's not a big deal.
I used to allow any email that shows up to the domains that I have, and I'd get way more spam. It's weird that 3,000 spams a day is slow since it's not like I go out signing up for stuff but I also don't hide my email.
I still get actual email that gets filtered as spam which sucks, but I put up with it since gmail works about 99.5% of the time. I wonder how many legit emails I've had that people think I ignored since I didn't respond.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
The problem is what happens when some reputable sender get's on the list.
I mentioned this to Mr. Hansteen a while back on usenet, warning him about putting his greytraps (and spamtraps) in public view on his webpages. All it takes for a legitimate sender to be listed with him, is one single newsletter signup with one of his traps.
Even though the trap will never respond, the sender will nevertheless have to send a message to the trap to attempt to verify the signup. Apparently, his list protects quite a lot of accounts, and he cannot whitelist everything ...
I never got a decent reply. I'm not sure what Mr. Hansteen's goal is, other than researching for its own sake and performing some good old sub-optimization of questionable value in the process.
Unlike the guy in TFA (who blocks the sender for 24 hours), I only assign some points in SpamAssassin.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
How does "investing in real servers" let the mail through content filtering? Last time I checked, a content filter reads the *contents* of the mail (ie not the envelope or the header, hence the name). The spammers can buy servers until they're blue in the face, that won't make a blind bit of difference to the outcome in that case.
I did my best to resist the impulse to stop browsing these comments at -1 because I had too often found interesting comments that had been modded down for the wrong reasons.
I guess I won't be able to do that any more, because I get too sad when I see how much energy some people expend in hatred of gays and blacks. Say, maybe we could filter comments by more than just the number? I wouldn't mind being able to see "-1 Flamebait" because often you find insightful comments that have been modded down by committed astroturfers, but "-1 Offtopic" (which my own comment here is, by the way) could get filtered out. Or how about a "-1 Racist/Sexist Asshole" moderation choice?
Where's the suggestion box here at Slashdot, anyway?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Can we "tour" those sites with molotov cocktails and pipe bombs?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just switched a client to google mail for business (really, what is it called? Google Apps? Google Mail? huh) and have heard nothing but complaints. The "gmail" thing gets email that never shows up in their imap folder, their imap folder gets stuff that disappears from their gmail thing.
Attachments work funny.
If you delete message from a "thread" in gmail, it will delete every "send" and "reply" message in the whole damn thread and thus nukes all of it in Outlook. If you nuke a single message in IMAP, it fucks up how gmail handles the thread.
All kinds of things. Their thole thing is great, but the minute you want to use a "real" mail program on top of it (like most businesses I know), trouble brews and shit just doesn't work the way you'd expect. There was a reason Google took so long to add IMAP support--their whole damn system works like no other email program. I bet they had to basically hack the whole damn thing to work like a "real" mail system IMAP was designed for. Basically, using them is a horrible form of lock-in.
Now I have to move them back to a "real" mail system this coming week so their life can work as it always did.