[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Plain Text Only

[Dan Wilder]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 02:35:09PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 1/6/02 2:35 AM, "Marc MERLIN" <marc_news@vasoftware.com> wrote:
> 
> >> of our websites, our upstream providers get anonymous complaints about
> >> "spamvertised website".  They then waste their time relaying these
> 
> > I receive abuse@sourceforge.net, so I'm very familiar with those too :-(
> 
> I hate to say it, but I effectively blackhole spamcop stuff. It's pretty
> useless to me as a postmaster of large mail list systems. I got tired of
> people using it as a tool to unsubscribe from mail lists because they're too
> lazy to read the instructions in the message, and since spamcop hides all
> useful data in the message they send to me, I toss them.
> 
> On the other hand, my favorite problem with this stuff is the time I ended
> up on the MAPs blackhole for hosting spam. It turned out that a subscriber
> to one of my mail lists (one with e-mail confirmation, I'll note) happened
> to be on a site that MAPs used an automated sniffer to find spam, and
> someone on that mail list sent out a message dsiscussing what she was going
> to do on vacation, and the MAPs sniffer decided it was a "you won a free
> vacation" spam, and wrote me up. So I got blackholed because two subscribers
> sent a legitimate piece of email to each other that was appropriate for the
> list they were on. Eventually, after having a discussion with Dave Rand, he
> figured out what was happening and promised to whitelist my site from
> further annoyance by the MAPs servers (what finally got me honked was that
> MAPs was testing my site for open relays about once a week. It turned out
> that the mail sent to my subscriber on that MAPs sniffer site was having the
> mail reported as spam or open relay about that often, and was actually
> losing a significant chunk of email to this "spam blocker"). They did
> whitelist me, for about three weeks, then the relay checks started again. At
> that time, I told my subscribers to move or get off the list (they moved),
> and put blocks up to prevent MAPs from contacting my server without
> permission, since I considered by that time their repeated scans an attack
> on my server. 
> 
> So if you see me make comments about how I'm not a big fan of these
> blackhole systems, there are any number of reasons. This is just one of
> them.

I agree with you.  I block mail claiming to come from spamcop with 

550 Blocked due to excessive frivolous or false complaints

Spam is a distressing problem, and there are days I (as a postmaster)
feel inundated, despite taking several measures.  The sites I administer
do DNS lookups, and decline to accept mail claiming to come from
places that don't have some sort of valid DNS record.  Using a 450, so
they'll retry for a while.  In case it's just a DNS screwup.  This
seems to dispose of quite a bit, and so far hasn't gotten me any
angry phone calls.  Everybody who cares at the sites I
administer has individual procmail filters of varying strictness, and
I sometimes spend a fair amount of time tuning them.

I can see how some people would feel desperate for a solution.

But I sure can't see letting automatic systems invoke sanctions.  I guess 
I see this as somehow more reprehensible even than spam.

-- 
Dan Wilder <wilder@eskimo.com>