[Spambayes] RE: whitelisting

[Harold Vandeventer]

I've not read this thread too closely, perhaps someone's already
commented on this point.  IMHO whitelisting doesn't seem to be worth the
trouble.  On numerous occasions, several of my coworkers have ALLEGEDLY
sent SPAM to other coworkers.  Upon investigation, those messages were
created outside of our system using spoofed addresses.  As a result, a
whitelist approach would not have stopped that junk.

____________________________________
 
Harold Vandeventer
Network Administrator
DPRA Incorporated
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Manhattan, KS 66503
 
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FAX: (785) 537-0272

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Meyer [mailto:tameyer at ihug.co.nz] 
Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 11:55 PM
To: 'Cedric Beust'; 'Katz, Amir'; 'Spambayes mailing list (E-mail)'
Subject: RE: [Spambayes] RE: whitelisting

>> Just my $0.02: one of the recent strains of viruses/worms
>> goes into a person's address book and sends mails either
>> to those addresses faking the 'From:' or uses those
>> addresses as the 'From:'. If you unquestionably trust
>> whitelisting, this kind of malware will hit you square
>> between the eyes.  
>
> True, but we are trying to block spam, not viruses.
[...]
> One tool for each purpose.

While I agree with this in principle, sometimes something that is good
at
(and aimed towards) one thing, just happens to do another really well.
There's nothing much in SpamBayes that's aimed at picking viruses (there
are
one or two tokens that are easy to spot, IIRC), but it does quite well
at
spotting them anyway (since they're often more homogenous than spam
anyway).

I think that the line between viruses and spam is becoming much harder
to
find.  From what I've read and seen, it's becoming much more common to
use
viruses as a spamming tool - either to harvest addresses or to use
compromised machines to send spam.

I don't know what the future holds, but if it's more of these
compromised
machines, then whitelisting will become less and less effective.  Until
this
year, I hadn't received any spam from people I know here in New Zealand,
but
I get a couple each week now.  Not much bother now (even if they weren't
classified correctly, which they are), but it will be if they continue
to
increase in frequency.

It's probably obvious by now, but I'm yet another person that would be
quite
happy for SpamBayes to have some sort of whitelisting gimmick, but would
have it turned off, and doesn't have the inclination to contribute
towards
coding it.

=Tony Meyer

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