[extropy-chat] the RBL racket

[Robert Bradbury]

On 7/31/06, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

>
> > domain sending out the spam in the first place.
> > 80% to 90% of all email traffic is now spam. And now that spammers are
> > switching to 'image' spam to avoid detection, the storage and
>
> Well, who'd thunk.


But this stuff is so easy to filter.  I never receive images from anyone (or
almost never).
The people I would want to receive images from are whitelisted.  All the
email that contains binary data, images, undesirable character sets, a host
of easy to identify Subject line misspellings, etc. gets flagged very early
on before the rule based or Bayesian filtering processing.  I would bet less
than 1% of it has to be "thought" about.

I'd only have to move this slightly upstream (before qmail receives the
entire "text" of the message) and it would get terminated before it has
consumed a fraction of its potential bandwidth.

The real problem involves (a) virus/trojan infected relay machines and (b)
ISPs who don't censor widespread spammers.  Those can be solved by forcing
the infected machines off of the network (it isn't hard for ISPs to monitor
and flag accounts which have high outgoing SMTP activity to "unusual"
locations and ISP operating "standards" (would you allow a physicians with
dirty hands to operate on you?).

I think the recent U.S. Court action classifying spammers as trespassers and
subject to fines and jail time in line with that is a big step in the right
direction.

Robert
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