[KLUG Members] email question

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > They might think so,  it won't help - if you can reply so can the 
> > SPAMers.  Address hiding is just silly, and in the end counter 
> > productive;  it creates a communication medium which can't be used
> > for communication.  Anyway,  you can find my e-mail address in a
> > jizillion places, and yet I get almost no SPAM whatsoever;  SPAM is a
> > solved problem through simple mechanisms on the the server.
> In this case, apparently it CAN be used as a communication medium, since
> replies get where they're going.  It probably is an attempt at stopping 
> spam, but I can't see how it would accomplish anything.

But if you find a message from someone and have a legitimate response,
you can't, because the address is hidden.  If I find someone who looks
like it would be interesting to invite to present at KLUG... I can't
because their e-mail is xxxx at xxxxxxx.  If I find a post to a forum with
a question/problem and I know the answer... I can't help them because
their e-mail is xxx at xxxxxxx.  There is no doubt this diminishes the
value of the medium.

> Spam is not, however, a "solved problem through simple mechanisms". 

I disagree.

> There are systems that do a pretty good job, but it's far from simple to 
> write them, 

It is trivial to write one.

> they all have an occasional false positive (legitimate mail 
> flagged as spam), 

Nope, never, not a one.

> and they all let some spam through.  

True,  but the kill rate is in excess of 95%, by some measures exceeding
98%

> Email services 
> that send spam are becoming big business, 

Yes they are.  They need to sent millions of messages, they need to do
it fast, and to every address they can scrounge.  This is trivial to use
against them - spammers are not running real fully functional MTAs,
there is no way that would ever be efficient enough.

> and it is a constant battle 
> between the senders trying to get through the filters and the filter 
> makers trying to stay ahead of them.  Who will win in the long run (if 
> anyone) is far from obvious at this point.

There is your mistake, the word "filter".  Filters, however
sophisticated, are dumb brute-force instruments.  Don't get the message
and filter it,  your still burning up your bandwidth (and filters don't
work).  Kill the connection at "HELO" thereby saving yourself the CPU
cycles, keeping your channel clear, and your INBOX manageable.  The SMTP
protocol itself has the functionality,  mostly unexploited, to do all
this for you.
http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist/

Set it up and forget about it.

> <aside>Gotta feel sorry for Hormel, though.  They're an amazingly good 
> sport about how the name of their product has been adopted as a near 
> profanity on the Internet.</aside>

I've never seen a Hormel spam message.
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