[KLUG Members] SpamCop

[Jamie McCarthy]

somercet@core.com (Peter Buxton) writes:

> > For activities like identifying terrorists or marking spam,
> > anecdotes are not all that helpful... it's the statistics that
> > matter.
> 
> You have such a study's URL handy?

No :/ and I don't think anyone does...

> > http://www.politechbot.com/p-04121.html
> > http://www.politechbot.com/p-04128.html
> > http://www.politechbot.com/p-04129.html ....
> 
> Wow... a series of anecdotes,

Yeah :)

> mostly about the same few incidents. I especially enjoyed the one
> from dano@well.com, where he seems to think SpamCop is a filter.

The main thing to learn from those is that SpamCop, like most
anti-spam services, will blacklist anybody for any reason at any
time and will take them off the list when they feel like it.
These services are helpful to system administrators, but the price
you pay is that your MTA is hijacked to advance someone else's
political agenda by deliberately blocking legitimate mail from
reaching your users.  (In the cases above, mail from a popular and
influential mailing list.)

> I have not heard of any RBL-like systems that don't tend to nail
> legitimate sites, that's why I asked.

I use relays.ordb.org, which claims to _only_ list open SMTP relays.
Also hil.habeas.com, which claims to _only_ list IPs which have
violated their whole haiku copyright trick.

But I have them both set to "/warn" in my exim.conf.  I don't trust
any DNSBL to block mail outright.

> I would also note that anti-spam activists are carrying on a kind
> of war, and aggression (too often labeled "bullying" by those who
> feel they have no dog in the fight) is how you fight a war.

That's a good way of putting it.  Sadly, for them, users who just
want to read their mail are collateral damage.  I've had that bite
me several times and wasted days or weeks trying to communicate
with my friends.  So I don't accept that anymore.

Client-based bayesian filtering is so good nowadays that there's
no excuse for any end user to be seeing more than 5-10 spams a
day.  The rest, your client should be able to send straight to the
spam folder, and if it can't, get a better client.  Of course that
doesn't help the sysadmin whose MTA is collapsing under the load.
-- 
  Jamie McCarthy
 http://mccarthy.vg/
  jamie@mccarthy.vg