Even with greylisting on an account that I've had since last century, it gets a few dozen spams. Without greylisting, it got hundreds a day - literally hundreds.
And technically, greylisting "breaks" email. If you have a non-compliant server that doesn't re-send 15 minutes later (as is the default in Sendmail, I believe), whoever you're trying to reach is never going to see your mail.
But without filtering, email is utterly useless. There used to be the idea that advertising through email might be useful, but that well has been poisoned and dead goats thrown in it, nearly poisoning the entire water table.
Then the problem isn't with the RBLs, but bad admins that never even skimmed news.admin.net-abuse.email. And yes, there are more bad admins and RBLs out there than you can shake a stick at.
But then there are excellent services out there like Spamhaus.
And allow Google and the US government to scan all of my mail?
Where have you been for the past (looks at calendar) 25 years?
The government archives every bit of email (and generic net traffic, for that matter) it can get its hands on. Remember Echelon? Remember Total Information Awareness? Snowden's "revelation" was something that everyone, who's paid attention for a few decades, already knew or assumed. The cost of a gigabyte is 3.5 cents retail these days. That's a lot of mail archiving for not a lot of money.
Unless you encrypt your mail locally before sending (and not rely on MTAs that use SSL) and your friends encrypt/their/ mail, then some computer along the way is going to read it.
It depends on how much you want to work at this. Most people don't care. There are people who do care, but don't know what to do, and this is a problem, because there are no turnkey/idiot-proof encrypted messaging systems out there that can be installed by Joe-User. It would be helpful if, by default, Thunderbird came bundled with gpg, for example, but configuring gpg isn't Joe-User proof.
Maintaining your own MTA is not enough. It has to happen client-side, before the mail even hits the MTA.
-- BMO
To give you an idea of how long I've been doing this shit, I remember the line eater.
Not every RBL is created equal. Anyone with half a brain knows which ones are good and which ones are so-so. The trick is to/weight/ them. Give a smaller score to the RBL you think makes mistakes.
Well, the OP wasn't exactly clear if it was just his personal account or whether it's a corporate server. My "least amount of work" thing is to forward every email address I have to gmail, and pull mail from there via imap. I get a few hundred spams a day just on one mail account, and I haven't lost any real mail due to Gmail's filtering.
Probably separate spam databases. Stuff like that happens. Gmail probably gets orders of magnitude more spam to "teach" the system.
YMMV.
Using grep and procmail is the stone-knives-and-bearskins approach to filtering. There are a lot of other filtering systems that will be much more efficient on Unix systems. He can begin by using greylisting to filter out the non-compliant "fire and forget" spambots and then filter the winnowed pile o' crap. At least greylisting's not server intensive (it throws the load back to the sender) since 5xx and 4xx errors are cheap.
Also blocking mail from dynamic IPs is a good idea.
At this point he can then run the mail through a series of weighted RBLs. Reach a certain score and it's tossed. That's the processor intensive bit, but it's at the end and non-intensive filtering has already happened.
Then if it's that inconvenient, we should all put "classified" information on our websites.
Make it inconvenient as hell for everyone in TLAs, because honestly, they've been cramping *our* style through intimidation and self-censorship because of the "gotta catch 'em all" archiving of everything that flies through the aether and fiber.
But where does it end? Do you read the privacy policies of all your recipients' hosts? How many hours are in your day? Do you include that useless-as-tits-on-a-bull "this is proprietary information blah blah blah" legal "disclaimer" on the bottom of your email?
Keeping a secret with two people is possible, and you know who the potential leak is right away. Even with 3 users you may never truly know which of the other 2 leaked something, but you can narrow it down easily.
"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead" -- Franklin
As a tangent, this explains why people claiming that we never landed on the Moon are nuts. Supposedly you'd have to have tens of thousands of people in on the secret conspiracy and never talking.
The short of it is that to try and rewrite it and say "no no, they werent christians" is insulting to the many founders who were.
The problem is that various revisionists have been evangelical christians trying to hold up the founders as if they too were evangelicals.
And it's still happening, even here. You conveniently ignored the first few sentences where I differentiated between modern "christianity" and the "christianity" of the founders, which was nearly atheism. Indeed if you ask a modern "christian" what a Unitarian Universalist is, you'll get "ungodly" or worse.
Ballmer has always had too much voting stock to be voted off as CEO. He was either going to retire or die, but being fired was not one of the options, ever.
They are assholes that have been taught to talk and migrated to the top of their bodies.
The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk Tags: Dr Benway, Naked Lunch, Texts by Burroughs, William Burroughs (aka âoeThe Talking Asshole Routineâ from Naked Lunch) William S. Burroughs
Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called âoeThe Better âOleâ that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, âoeOh I say, are you still down there, old thing?â
âoeNah I had to go relieve myself.â
After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: âoeItâ(TM)s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.â
After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpoleâ(TM)s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous â" (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) â" except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldnâ(TM)t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldnâ(TM)t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crabâ(TM)s eyes on the end of a stalk.
This is exactly what you see when you turn on Fox "News" and look at the eyes of the so-called "anchors."
Lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.
-- BMO
Yeah, I know, that was a Jaws quote at the end. Sue me.
No, they were deists at best, which if you describe this to today's "christians" you'd get a horrified reaction as if they were (horrors!) Unitarian Universalists or... atheists! Today's "christians" believe that God has a direct hand in the lives of everyone. This is in direct opposition to the "clockwork universe" view espoused by the Deists - "God set everything in motion and then abandoned the work to run on its own."
Which is the only thing that makes sense if you're going to write papers on logic and reason, like the founders did. If you have a god that is fiddling around with everything, where is the room for reason?
The Letter to the Danbury Baptists by Jefferson where he says "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. and the letter to the Touro Synagogue by none other than George Washington himself prove that the US is not a "christian nation" - that every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid..
I suggest you read them. They're even short enough for a 4channer to read.
Jefferson's version of the New Testament Bible only came to 40 pages, after ripping out what he described as nonsense. "I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines."
People who think that the "founding fathers" were "christian" in the modern sense of the word are wrong. Paine was an atheist and proud of it.
"Hell, the Anti-Federalists argued against the US Constitution because it didn't mention God specifically."
This is also just plain wrong. Rhode Island's history was that of a refuge from the theocracy and other bullshit in the Massachusetts colony, where they did things like hang Quakers. The Charter of 1663 granted to Rhode Island by King Charles II a "lively experiment" in religious freedom - you could be anything you liked and not have to toe the line of Christianity or/version/ of Christianity, for example (since the natives were clearly not Christian). This was basically because of the efforts of people like Roger Williams, who didn't see the natives with the disdain that much of the English did. Go read "A Key into the Language of the Americas" for that and "The Bloudy Tenent" for his assertion that a state church "stinks in the nostrils of God," which was also cited by Jefferson when crafting the First Amendment to the Constitution.
There was an unfortunate time when troops from MA would come into RI chasing "heretics" like Anne Hutchinson.
Because of this history, RI was a hotbed of anti-federalism by the 1780s One of the prominent anti-federalists was from my hometown of North Kingstown, RI - William West. It's because of him (he marched an army of 1000 into Providence to protest ratification in 1788) and others like him that Rhode Island was the 13'th state, the last of the colonies to ratify the Constitution. The point of the anti-federalists was to be anti-central-government, because people like William West saw central government as antithetical to religious freedom, among other things.
And I haven't even mentioned William Penn yet. When you're thrown into prison because of your religious views, you tend to come out of prison severely pissed off and wary of state religion.
Don't try to tell me history. This is my back yard.
Slashdot Mirror
The schedule for the Two Minute Hate has been adjusted to 13:00 Pacific Time.
Snowden is the new Emmanuel Goldstein.
--
BMO
To follow up, I have to say something -
Even with greylisting on an account that I've had since last century, it gets a few dozen spams. Without greylisting, it got hundreds a day - literally hundreds.
And technically, greylisting "breaks" email. If you have a non-compliant server that doesn't re-send 15 minutes later (as is the default in Sendmail, I believe), whoever you're trying to reach is never going to see your mail.
But without filtering, email is utterly useless. There used to be the idea that advertising through email might be useful, but that well has been poisoned and dead goats thrown in it, nearly poisoning the entire water table.
--
BMO
Then the problem isn't with the RBLs, but bad admins that never even skimmed news.admin.net-abuse.email. And yes, there are more bad admins and RBLs out there than you can shake a stick at.
But then there are excellent services out there like Spamhaus.
--
BMO - Lumber Cartel #2501
And allow Google and the US government to scan all of my mail?
Where have you been for the past (looks at calendar) 25 years?
The government archives every bit of email (and generic net traffic, for that matter) it can get its hands on. Remember Echelon? Remember Total Information Awareness? Snowden's "revelation" was something that everyone, who's paid attention for a few decades, already knew or assumed. The cost of a gigabyte is 3.5 cents retail these days. That's a lot of mail archiving for not a lot of money.
Unless you encrypt your mail locally before sending (and not rely on MTAs that use SSL) and your friends encrypt /their/ mail, then some computer along the way is going to read it.
It depends on how much you want to work at this. Most people don't care. There are people who do care, but don't know what to do, and this is a problem, because there are no turnkey/idiot-proof encrypted messaging systems out there that can be installed by Joe-User. It would be helpful if, by default, Thunderbird came bundled with gpg, for example, but configuring gpg isn't Joe-User proof.
Maintaining your own MTA is not enough. It has to happen client-side, before the mail even hits the MTA.
--
BMO
To give you an idea of how long I've been doing this shit, I remember the line eater.
Fuck you and your RBLs.
Not every RBL is created equal. Anyone with half a brain knows which ones are good and which ones are so-so. The trick is to /weight/ them. Give a smaller score to the RBL you think makes mistakes.
Go take your blind hate elsewhere.
--
BMO
Well, the OP wasn't exactly clear if it was just his personal account or whether it's a corporate server. My "least amount of work" thing is to forward every email address I have to gmail, and pull mail from there via imap. I get a few hundred spams a day just on one mail account, and I haven't lost any real mail due to Gmail's filtering.
>postini
You do realize that is being EOLed, yes?
http://postini-transition.googleapps.com/
>why gmail filters better than postini
Probably separate spam databases. Stuff like that happens. Gmail probably gets orders of magnitude more spam to "teach" the system.
YMMV.
Using grep and procmail is the stone-knives-and-bearskins approach to filtering. There are a lot of other filtering systems that will be much more efficient on Unix systems. He can begin by using greylisting to filter out the non-compliant "fire and forget" spambots and then filter the winnowed pile o' crap. At least greylisting's not server intensive (it throws the load back to the sender) since 5xx and 4xx errors are cheap.
Also blocking mail from dynamic IPs is a good idea.
At this point he can then run the mail through a series of weighted RBLs. Reach a certain score and it's tossed. That's the processor intensive bit, but it's at the end and non-intensive filtering has already happened.
--
BMO
You could route everything through gmail and wash out the spam.
Gmail's spam detection is spectacular.
inb4 gmail hate.
--
BMO
Then if it's that inconvenient, we should all put "classified" information on our websites.
Make it inconvenient as hell for everyone in TLAs, because honestly, they've been cramping *our* style through intimidation and self-censorship because of the "gotta catch 'em all" archiving of everything that flies through the aether and fiber.
--
BMO
Because I didn't let the troll get away with his nonsense and instead gave him a smack upside the head with actual facts.
Nothing kills trolls dead better than facts with references from reputable sources.
--
BMO
"It's useless, but idiot gamers will buy anything if we call it over clocked :D"
And
"A certain percentage will fry them and void the warranty and will have to buy more. They lose, we win!"
--
BMO
Then blacklist gmail from your outgoing mail.
Wow, that was difficult.
But where does it end? Do you read the privacy policies of all your recipients' hosts? How many hours are in your day? Do you include that useless-as-tits-on-a-bull "this is proprietary information blah blah blah" legal "disclaimer" on the bottom of your email?
Where does your insanity end?
--
BMO
Which is why I brought up Unitarian Universalists.
They're as close to the Deists you can get in modern times.
--
BMO
"I have to start over."
Boo fucking hoo. Use a virtual machine, numbnuts.
Restore "safe" image and you're done.
--
BMO
Pretty much this.
Prior restraint is bollocks.
--
BMO
"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead" -- Franklin
As a tangent, this explains why people claiming that we never landed on the Moon are nuts. Supposedly you'd have to have tens of thousands of people in on the secret conspiracy and never talking.
--
BMO
" 'This is why you don't hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.'"
No, what happens is when you do shit that shocks the conscience, someone, somewhere, is going to expose you for the douchebag that you are.
Stop being a douchebag.
--
BMO
The short of it is that to try and rewrite it and say "no no, they werent christians" is insulting to the many founders who were.
The problem is that various revisionists have been evangelical christians trying to hold up the founders as if they too were evangelicals.
And it's still happening, even here. You conveniently ignored the first few sentences where I differentiated between modern "christianity" and the "christianity" of the founders, which was nearly atheism. Indeed if you ask a modern "christian" what a Unitarian Universalist is, you'll get "ungodly" or worse.
Stop trying to twist history.
Bye.
--
BMO
>Ballmer fired.
People keep repeating this as if it was true.
Ballmer has always had too much voting stock to be voted off as CEO. He was either going to retire or die, but being fired was not one of the options, ever.
--
BMO
Immanentize the Eschaton? I'm busy trying to MONETIZE IT!
--
BMO
...because 2D sexting is not enough for Anthony Weiner!
"heh heh heh he said weiner" - Beavis
--
BMO - puerile enough for you!
Nope, a Fox news talking head.
No, they are talking assholes.
They are assholes that have been taught to talk and migrated to the top of their bodies.
This is exactly what you see when you turn on Fox "News" and look at the eyes of the so-called "anchors."
Lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.
--
BMO
Yeah, I know, that was a Jaws quote at the end. Sue me.
I typed:
"40 pages"
Clearly I was wrong, I meant 46 pages.
--
BMO
>The founding fathers were Christians.
No, they were deists at best, which if you describe this to today's "christians" you'd get a horrified reaction as if they were (horrors!) Unitarian Universalists or ... atheists! Today's "christians" believe that God has a direct hand in the lives of everyone. This is in direct opposition to the "clockwork universe" view espoused by the Deists - "God set everything in motion and then abandoned the work to run on its own."
Which is the only thing that makes sense if you're going to write papers on logic and reason, like the founders did. If you have a god that is fiddling around with everything, where is the room for reason?
The Letter to the Danbury Baptists by Jefferson where he says "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. and the letter to the Touro Synagogue by none other than George Washington himself prove that the US is not a "christian nation" - that every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid..
I suggest you read them. They're even short enough for a 4channer to read.
http://www.tourosynagogue.org/index.php/history-learning/gw-letter
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html
Jefferson's version of the New Testament Bible only came to 40 pages, after ripping out what he described as nonsense. "I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines."
People who think that the "founding fathers" were "christian" in the modern sense of the word are wrong. Paine was an atheist and proud of it.
"Hell, the Anti-Federalists argued against the US Constitution because it didn't mention God specifically."
This is also just plain wrong. Rhode Island's history was that of a refuge from the theocracy and other bullshit in the Massachusetts colony, where they did things like hang Quakers. The Charter of 1663 granted to Rhode Island by King Charles II a "lively experiment" in religious freedom - you could be anything you liked and not have to toe the line of Christianity or /version/ of Christianity, for example (since the natives were clearly not Christian). This was basically because of the efforts of people like Roger Williams, who didn't see the natives with the disdain that much of the English did. Go read "A Key into the Language of the Americas" for that and "The Bloudy Tenent" for his assertion that a state church "stinks in the nostrils of God," which was also cited by Jefferson when crafting the First Amendment to the Constitution.
There was an unfortunate time when troops from MA would come into RI chasing "heretics" like Anne Hutchinson.
Because of this history, RI was a hotbed of anti-federalism by the 1780s One of the prominent anti-federalists was from my hometown of North Kingstown, RI - William West. It's because of him (he marched an army of 1000 into Providence to protest ratification in 1788) and others like him that Rhode Island was the 13'th state, the last of the colonies to ratify the Constitution. The point of the anti-federalists was to be anti-central-government, because people like William West saw central government as antithetical to religious freedom, among other things.
And I haven't even mentioned William Penn yet. When you're thrown into prison because of your religious views, you tend to come out of prison severely pissed off and wary of state religion.
Don't try to tell me history. This is my back yard.
--
BMO
"The founding fathers (in their graves)?"
Roger Williams and William Penn when Tea Party idiots claim that the US is a "Christian Country."
--
BMO
Ray Kurzweil says it will only take a decade.
Personally, I think he's FOS.
--
BMO