I run a mailing list for my cycling team. I can guarantee that no spam originates from it. Yet, every month or so, all messages to AOL from the lists begin to bounce. I'm even paying the extra money for a commercial broadband line so that my IP is not blackholed.
Myself, and the president of the team in question (who just happens to be an AOL user) have both complained. It works for a month or two, and then they are rejecting again.
I love providing a service to my cycling team, but it's almost to the point where I'm going to have to tell AOL users to find another way. It's sad, because they are a significant portion of my user community.
Flash and image ads in themselves are not evil things. Let me restate that.
Flash and image ads - in themselves - are not evil.
Yes they are. They are incredibly distracting.
You know, if all of these ad companies had just stuck to unobtrusive small UNANIMATED banners (circa 1994-95) at the top of their pages, I would never have even bothered with Ad filtering, and may have even clicked on the ad for some interesting stuff.
As it is, they don't have the opportunity to ever meet my eye. Greed leads to loss of revenue. Too bad.
Way back when usenet was useful, I actually hung out on the newsgroups. I remember reading this post in alt.games.doom:
Eric::You may be a DOOM GOD, but I am the Master of your Universe and all that bow:down to you eventually bow down to me. Yes, even YOU, Eric, kneel and drink my:knob after having beaten all who challenge you. Do you dare take on your:master, pitiful DOOM GOD?:Email me and request your ass beating, if you have the balls.
We'd all love to be able to get paid well for what is in essence a hobby. But it doesn't (and shouldn't) work that way. If you work hard at your hobby, and there is enough demand for it, then the money will come (local bands earning cover charges at the door, and then more money by selling their CDs at shows, for example).
There is no right to profit. Share your work. If it's good enough and widespread enough that you can make a living off of it, great. If not, then find a job you can deal with that pays the bills and continue sharing your hobby in your spare time like the rest of us do.
I'm an expert class mountain biker. I don't get paid to train though. I also write code in my spare time. No payment for that either. I host web sites and wrote databases for my cycling team. No payment there. I work a decent job to get paid, and it makes these other things possible. I teach what I know. But I don't get paid for it. Why should I? It'd be nice, but I'm not going to whine about not being able to do what I love as a career, since it is not feasible (I don't feel like generating the demand, and also don't feel the profits should just exist without working for them...marketing, etc..)
I was thinking 'throughput' at first, since throughput is typically shown in bps rather than Bps. For example, our typical FreeSWAN gateway has a throughput of around 52Mbps.
Sorry to follow up to my own post. I just wanted to add that this also works very nicely on the corporate mail servers that I manage.
Want to stop it?
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, this does take some work, and no it isn't for everybody. But this has totally eliminated all spam to my inbox (mostly due to greylisting, I think)
Get a high speed connection
Use some dyndns service, or register your domain, or get a business class line.
Set up a sendmail server
Use mimedefang, spamassassin, and milter-greylist
set up the greylist for 5 minutes or so. Spammers don't retry.
discard obvious stupidity in your mimedefang filter(no '.' in helo argument, trying to say they are you in the helo, helo is RFC1918, sender is on spamhaus RBL/XBL, etc)
set up things like receipt throttling and greet pause in sendmail
I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.
The age limit idea is dumb, but if you had to pass a test about proper netiquette, security, etc before being allowed to connect to the Internet, that would be helpful. Just like a HAM license. I like the idea.
What I've found is that perl is the only language I can be away from for an extended period of time, and then be able to write in it without looking at a single reference the next time I try. That is very powerful. Perl lets you use your own style is probably the reason. If your style of coding is organized, you have nothing to worry about when trying to decipher what you wrote a few years ago.
6 channels means 3 stereo audio streams. No more. So if you have a stereo sound track, there go two of them. Now you only have 4 channels for the game itself. Or maybe you are monitoring several videos at once. After the third, no more sound. 6 channels is almost worthless. Even my aging SBLIve can do 64. And for gamers, there is always the opportunity to add more simultaneous sound to the environment.
I was looking at those, but ended up going with the logitech one with the cord that wraps around for storage. No need to worry about batteries or wireless issues ever that way.
Or just go to http://www.shoutcast.com/ The only reason I'd own a portable MP3 player is to stream a few hours a day from shoutcast to a file, and then dump that on the mp3 player. While I like my own collection, I would just get bored with it on the bike after awhile anyway.
Mimedefang + Spamassassin + Sendmail configs. Why use the CPU cycles to analyze email for spam, when you can outright discard most of the stuff right away (milters kick ass in this respect...no need to receive the whole message. First sign of trouble, and BLAM! It's rejected:)
And of course, set up your mimedefang filter
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`mimedefang', `S=unix:/var/spool/MIMEDefang/mimedefang.sock, F=T, T=S:360s;R:360s;E:15m')
In your mimedefang script in the filter_sender subroutine:
reject anything in the spamhaus sbl-xbl list.
reject from any server that sends a helo that is not a FQDN (just look for a '.' in the name, is all I do...spam software is stupid and helos with single words).
reject anything that helos with your own mail server or domain name.
reject anything that helos with rfc1918 addresses.
In spamassassin:
most defaults are good. Make sure you enable the blackhole checks.
configure an account on your sever called 'spam'. Use procmail to write a recipe that will send anything you forward to that account to your bayes spam database.
make sure that only you can send to the 'spam' account using filter_recipient in mimedefang.
do the same with a 'notspam' local account to fix anything that gets mistakenly flagged. You should use sane settings for discard vs. put in a folder for manual analysis.
Optionally, add milter_greylist to the mix. Greylisting REALLY cuts down on the traffic sent to your servers and hits spammers where it hurts...requiring them to use THEIR resources to queue temp-failed messages.
some stats from my current mail log (home server, not huge volume, but I use the same methods at work with great success). The current log is for Dec 18 - 21.
$ grep -i spamhaus/var/log/maillog | wc -l 354 (rejected for being on the sbl/xbl list) $ grep -i misconfigured/var/log/maillog | wc -l 32 (rejected for having bad helo) $ grep 'You are NOT'/var/log/maillog | wc -l 79 (rejected for pretending to be my server in the helo) $ grep -i 'send to this address'/var/log/maillog | wc -l 8 (people not on one of my mail lists trying to send to the list) $ grep -i spamdiscard/var/log/maillog | wc -l 115 (stuff analyzed and found likely enough to be spam to be dropped) $ grep spam/var/log/maillog | wc -l 145 (stuff that was flagged as spam, but not automatically discarded)
So, you can see that of 733 spammy messages in ~3 days, only 260 had to actually be analyzed by spamassassin. In the case of rejections, the sender is notified, so if they are *not* a spammer, they can contact you to resolve their misconfiguration. I reject on the spamhaus lists, and no others, because it is very easy to remove yourself from those lists if you find yourself on them for some reason. The other lists are used in scoring, however, when spamassasin does its thing.
Perl is the only language I have used that I can sit down and be productive with after a couple years of non-programming without having to look at a single reference book. Try that with C or Bash.
Well, that is well and good if you trust whoever is creating mp3's, wma's, ogg's, or whatever you prefer doing it right. I prefer to burn myself so that I can normalize things properly, put the id3 tag in the form I like, name the file itself the way I like in the directory structure I like, and use high quality variable bitrates. Somehow I don't think I can get all of that if my only option is to buy the compressed version and nothing else. I just go down to cd warehouse and buy my stuff used to save costs and keep the originals packed away in my footlocker after encoding to my own specs.
Now if all record stores went to huge fileservers with Gig Ethernet, and I could go to the store, buy a few CD's worth of songs and dump them to a CD or DVD, that would be great. But again...it has to be the raw uncompressed data to be worth my buying it (unless they are very cheap, but I don't see that happening). I've always seen stuff that you find on the p2p network as a way to advertise (I bought some CD's based on what I heard from a download), or to get a single song that I would never buy anyway.
but you shouldn't be running those gui apps on the server itself. Use them from your desktop. Just because I *can* run X11 apps on my server to configure things doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Just mid-click on the link to open it in a new tab (or right-click, t). I'm replying to you right now doing that.
If that network is so critical, then why is it so vulnerable???
Myself, and the president of the team in question (who just happens to be an AOL user) have both complained. It works for a month or two, and then they are rejecting again.
I love providing a service to my cycling team, but it's almost to the point where I'm going to have to tell AOL users to find another way. It's sad, because they are a significant portion of my user community.
Yes they are. They are incredibly distracting.
You know, if all of these ad companies had just stuck to unobtrusive small UNANIMATED banners (circa 1994-95) at the top of their pages, I would never have even bothered with Ad filtering, and may have even clicked on the ad for some interesting stuff.
As it is, they don't have the opportunity to ever meet my eye. Greed leads to loss of revenue. Too bad.
It's not really a worm. What, exactly, is microsoft supposed to patch?
Then what is your excuse for why M$ actually is doing well?
here here to #2. Boo mile long traversals that are all toe-side!
We'd all love to be able to get paid well for what is in essence a hobby. But it doesn't (and shouldn't) work that way. If you work hard at your hobby, and there is enough demand for it, then the money will come (local bands earning cover charges at the door, and then more money by selling their CDs at shows, for example).
There is no right to profit. Share your work. If it's good enough and widespread enough that you can make a living off of it, great. If not, then find a job you can deal with that pays the bills and continue sharing your hobby in your spare time like the rest of us do.
I'm an expert class mountain biker. I don't get paid to train though. I also write code in my spare time. No payment for that either. I host web sites and wrote databases for my cycling team. No payment there. I work a decent job to get paid, and it makes these other things possible. I teach what I know. But I don't get paid for it. Why should I? It'd be nice, but I'm not going to whine about not being able to do what I love as a career, since it is not feasible (I don't feel like generating the demand, and also don't feel the profits should just exist without working for them...marketing, etc..)
I was thinking 'throughput' at first, since throughput is typically shown in bps rather than Bps. For example, our typical FreeSWAN gateway has a throughput of around 52Mbps.
Sorry to follow up to my own post. I just wanted to add that this also works very nicely on the corporate mail servers that I manage.
I was getting 2-3 flagged by spamass after passing through the mimedefang stuff before implementing greylisting. Post greylisting I've yet to get a single spam in my spam folder (they never made it to my inbox before, but I still had to deal with them.). I have things configured to flag at 2 points, discard at 7. My bayes filters have about 2 years worth of training on them, and I use RBL scoring too.
The age limit idea is dumb, but if you had to pass a test about proper netiquette, security, etc before being allowed to connect to the Internet, that would be helpful. Just like a HAM license. I like the idea.
What I've found is that perl is the only language I can be away from for an extended period of time, and then be able to write in it without looking at a single reference the next time I try. That is very powerful. Perl lets you use your own style is probably the reason. If your style of coding is organized, you have nothing to worry about when trying to decipher what you wrote a few years ago.
6 channels means 3 stereo audio streams. No more. So if you have a stereo sound track, there go two of them. Now you only have 4 channels for the game itself. Or maybe you are monitoring several videos at once. After the third, no more sound. 6 channels is almost worthless. Even my aging SBLIve can do 64. And for gamers, there is always the opportunity to add more simultaneous sound to the environment.
Thanks! I've been looking for something like this for quite some time! This makes setting up an appliance in the living room that much easier.
I was looking at those, but ended up going with the logitech one with the cord that wraps around for storage. No need to worry about batteries or wireless issues ever that way.
Or just go to http://www.shoutcast.com/ The only reason I'd own a portable MP3 player is to stream a few hours a day from shoutcast to a file, and then dump that on the mp3 player. While I like my own collection, I would just get bored with it on the bike after awhile anyway.
Diapers.
AFAIK, linux got its start as Linus's project to edit text.
In Sendmail:
FEATURE(`greet_pause', `1500')dnl
define(`confBAD_RCPT_THROTTLE',`3')dnl
define(`confPRIVACY_FLAGS', `goaway,restrictmailq,restrictqrun')dnl dnl define(`confTO_QUEUEWARN', `4h')
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`mimedefang', `S=unix:/var/spool/MIMEDefang/mimedefang.sock, F=T, T=S:360s;R:360s;E:15m')
In your mimedefang script in the filter_sender subroutine:
In spamassassin:
Optionally, add milter_greylist to the mix. Greylisting REALLY cuts down on the traffic sent to your servers and hits spammers where it hurts...requiring them to use THEIR resources to queue temp-failed messages.
some stats from my current mail log (home server, not huge volume, but I use the same methods at work with great success). The current log is for Dec 18 - 21.
So, you can see that of 733 spammy messages in ~3 days, only 260 had to actually be analyzed by spamassassin. In the case of rejections, the sender is notified, so if they are *not* a spammer, they can contact you to resolve their misconfiguration. I reject on the spamhaus lists, and no others, because it is very easy to remove yourself from those lists if you find yourself on them for some reason. The other lists are used in scoring, however, when spamassasin does its thing.
Perl is the only language I have used that I can sit down and be productive with after a couple years of non-programming without having to look at a single reference book. Try that with C or Bash.
Now if all record stores went to huge fileservers with Gig Ethernet, and I could go to the store, buy a few CD's worth of songs and dump them to a CD or DVD, that would be great. But again...it has to be the raw uncompressed data to be worth my buying it (unless they are very cheap, but I don't see that happening). I've always seen stuff that you find on the p2p network as a way to advertise (I bought some CD's based on what I heard from a download), or to get a single song that I would never buy anyway.
but you shouldn't be running those gui apps on the server itself. Use them from your desktop. Just because I *can* run X11 apps on my server to configure things doesn't make it the right thing to do.