[Python-Dev] mail.python.org black listed ?!

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Thomas Wouters wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2001 at 02:31:45PM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > > I think the whole black list exercise has been a net waste of time
> > > and certainly has done little to stem the flow of email spam.
> 
> > Amen.  My thoughts exactly.
> 
> I disagree, but for a very simple reason: I don't block based on blacklists,
> I flag :) Blocking on the SMTP server is a bad idea, IMO too, though I can
> understand that people running a single, small SMTP server want to block
> spam at the earliest moment. But by flagging it, I can save it to a
> different folder, or send auto-replies, or just colour it in my mail client
> (mutt).
> 
> We have a basic procmailrc which does a whole boatload of spamchecks (ORBS,
> RBL, DUL, RSS, various header-checks for illegal ipadresses, well known spam
> software, well known addresses like friend@public.com, buffer-overflow
> attempts, etc) and simply adds a header to my emails, which I then give a
> scoring and color based on what spamtests it triggered. No single spam test
> is 100% accurate, but I haven't seen false positives on something that has
> ORBS or RBL *and* DUL, RSS, or one or more of the others.
> 
> Sadly, ORBS is exit, and MAPS is turning into a commercial service. We're
> still debating, at work, whether to pay for it or not :P
> 
> If people are interested in the procmailrc, and the  perl script (sorry) it
> uses, let me know and I'll see if we can distribute it. It's already
> available to XS4ALL customers, together with a simple script to report spam
> to Spamcop, which is especially easy to use from inside mutt :)

Perhaps we should start a small project for such a tool written in
Python (to bring the subject back on topic ;-) and place it on
the web somewhere ?!

If we separate out the engine from the rest we could also have
different backends, e.g. one which hooks into .forward as filter,
a daemon style backend which does on-server flagging based on
imap, a Mailman filter backend which does the same for mailing
lists etc.

Would be cool to have python-list mark non-python spam using a 
special header automagically ;-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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