[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Plain Text Only

[Dan Wilder]

Wondering if you're also testing SpamCop, http://www.spamcop.com.
The work of a Seattleite named Julian Haight, http://www.julianhaight.com,
and have any comment.

I haven't evaluated it, but I'm afraid I've a bit of a bone to 
pick with it.  False positives are not unknown.  Worse, it sends automatic 
anonymous complaints to upstream providers of anybody even mentioned in 
the putative spam.

For example, apparently there's a California Linux user group,
one of whose subscribers (I've no way of telling who) has SpamCop
installed.  When a post goes out to that user group mentioning one 
of our websites, our upstream providers get anonymous complaints about 
"spamvertised website".  They then waste their time relaying these 
to me, and I waste my time explaining, for the nth time.

For another example, one of our mailing lists had a subscriber who
apparently decided he didn't like us.  Instead of unsubscribing, he 
began making SpamCop complaints.  I wasted about an hour on that one, 
until I eventually determined what domain the complaint had come 
from, and solved the problem by deleting everybody from the domain
(the number was small) from all of our lists.

Yet another.  "Forgot my password" on our Mailman lists apparently
trips at some SpamCop content filter; I've fielded at least
one spam auto-complaint thus generated.

Complaints about false or frivolous reports to SpamCop, which operates 
the anonymous remailer, have so far been ignored.   At this point I've 
personally given up on expecting reasonable behavior from them, and 
added a "deny" to our MTA setup, for all mail from their domain.

The SpamCop site has verbiage implying that a mailing list had better 
be able to prove it is double-opt-in, and had better maintain proof of 
opt-in for each individual subscriber, or else.  The "or else" isn't 
specified, but apparently Mr. Haight has had some record of success in 
arranging loss of internet connectivity.  No doubt some of those affected 
have been actual spammers, but with one man serving as judge, jury, 
and executioner, I'm afraid I don't see much about this effort to reassure 
the rest of us.

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 04:42:51PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
> On Sat, 5 Jan 2002 00:26:38 +0100 
> fil  <fil@rezo.net> wrote:
> 
> > Here's something that would be most useful against spam: somewhere
> > in the pipeline check the message against the "razor" (**) spam
> > database, and send it to the trash if it matches.
> 
> I've been running Razor in test mode here on my personal mail
> account for about 5 weeks.  To date the false positive rate is about
> 8%.  That's far too high for deployment as a system service.  It
> also has a very high false negative rate (worse than any of the
> other's I'm testing).
> 
> SpamAssassion conversely has a false positive rate (over the same
> period) of 3 messages out of 93,648 (yes, I get a lot of mail at
> home).
> 
> -- 
> J C Lawrence                
> ---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
> claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
> http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
> 
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> Mailman-Developers@python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
> 

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 Dan Wilder <dan@ssc.com>   Technical Manager & Editor
 SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549   Phone:  206-782-8808
 Seattle, WA  98155-0549    URL http://embedded.linuxjournal.com/
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