[KLUG Members] email question

[Mike Williams]

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

>>>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.
>  
>
But if I was understanding the message properly, sending to xxx at xxxxx 
gets to its intended recipient, whatever the actual email address is.  I 
agree, this seems to make hiding the email address pointless, but at 
least it isn't doing much harm.

>>Spam is not, however, a "solved problem through simple mechanisms". 
>>    
>>
>
>I disagree.
>
>  
>
Fair enough.

>>There are systems that do a pretty good job, but it's far from simple to 
>>write them, 
>>    
>>
>
>It is trivial to write one.
>  
>
Not if you want it to work well.

>  
>
>>they all have an occasional false positive (legitimate mail 
>>flagged as spam), 
>>    
>>
>
>Nope, never, not a one.
>  
>
Then consider yourself lucky!  Or do you just never look at your 
quarantine list?

>  
>
>>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.
>
>  
>
Efficiency matters when you're using an actual mail server, but not when 
you're sending with a horde of slaved Windows 98 boxes that you've 
installed spambots on because they weren't patched properly.

>>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/
>  
>
OK, filter as in "spam filtering software" then.  Most systems use 
multiple techniques (blacklists, keyword filters, regular expressions, 
maybe greylisting, and probably lots of stuff I don't understand) to get 
a decent catch rate.  Grey-listing works on the assumption that the 
spambots are not smart enough to handle a tempfail properly.  It's 
trivial to code them so that they do, and quite a few zombie programs 
HAVE adjusted their programming to get around simple grey-listing.  It 
also increases the load on small to medium-sized sender mail servers to 
queue up all those messages that are waiting for a server that pretends 
to be too busy.

>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.
>
You missed the point.  Spam is a registered trademark of Hormel.  They 
have the right, particularly under US copyright law, to forbid the use 
of the term spam to refer to email, and to threaten legal action against 
anybody who does.  They've done relatively little of this.  Whether 
their motives are good sportsmanship or the sheer futility of fighting 
it doesn't really matter.