Fighting Spam with Python

[Christos Georgiou]

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 22:46:28 -0700, rumours say that David MacQuigg <dmq
at pobox.com> might have written:

>I'm writing some scripts to check incoming mail against a registry of
>reputable senders, using the new authentication methods.  Python is
>ideal for this because it will give mail-system admins the ability to
>experiment with the different methods, and provide some real-world
>feedback sorely needed by the advocates of each method.  So far, we
>have SPF and CSV.  See http://purl.net/macquigg/email/python for the
>latest project status.

I am on the side of advocating SPF records --and I am one of the first
four postmasters in my country's TLD that set up SPF records for two of
the email domains I'm administrating.  SPF is an internet draft now.[1]

Your method is/will_not be free (as in beer), as hinted in
http://www.ece.arizona.edu/~edatools/home/email/registry/Form-Sender01.htm
.  *That* is a drawback similar to the licensing of the Microsoft's
Sender/Caller-ID scheme.  Why not support open, free standards?

I have developped scripts of my own to perform various consistency
checks (including SPF lookup) and maintain my own black list (I am
consulting three RBL's which I have found to be close to my standards,
but I want to avoid excessive usage of their bandwidth), and although it
takes some time almost every day overseeing things, I would be very
timid to support such a free (as in jazz :) scheme.  I mean, the
"reputation" idea is nice, but paying for this reputation won't help its
spreading.

Good luck with it as a business, though.


[1]
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-schlitt-spf-classic-02.txt
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-newton-maawg-spf-considerations-00.txt
-- 
TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best.
"Dear Paul,
please stop spamming us."
The Corinthians