[Mailman-Users] spam, spamcop and mailman moderation
Brad Knowles
brad at shub-internet.org
Sat Nov 11 04:01:38 CET 2006
At 11:49 AM -0600 11/10/06, Patrick Bogen wrote:
>> So the end of greylisting as a useful tool is approaching (I'm surprised it
>> has survived this long).
>
> I understand this point. I think that greylisting should persist, in
> any case, since, if nothing else, it doubles the work a spammer has to
> do; and on the scale they work, that's a lot.
Nope. It's trivially easy for them to track which sites have
resulted in a tempfail, and then to retry those messages an hour
later.
Keep in mind that they have botnets of millions or tens of millions
of machines, and they effectively have more CPU cycles and network
bandwidth than anyone else on the planet.
Trust me, you *WILL* lose. The question is by how much you will
lose. And how hard you will fight to continue to tread water at that
level. And when they throw ten times as much resources at you next
week, are you willing to work ten times as hard to continue to tread
water? And when they throw a hundred times as much resources at you
the week following, what then?
> Personally, I'd like to see hashcash become widespread, but I guess
> that'd be hell for a mailing list.
Not scalable for large quantities of legitimate users, and doesn't
pose any real significant cost burden for spammers, since they have
unlimited CPU power at their disposal.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>
Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org
mail forwarding service as of 15 November 2006. If you have an old
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with the current address.
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