Re: Anti-Spam ideas for usenet/list harvested email addresses

From: Jacob Anawalt (jacob_at_cachevalley.com)
Date: 09/24/03

  • Next message: Henning Moll: "Re: revoking public key"
    Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 15:20:09 -0600 (MDT)
    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
    
    

    Arnt Karlsen said:
    > On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 22:06:19 -0600,
    > Jacob Anawalt <jacob@cachevalley.com> wrote in message
    > <3F71183B.70506@cachevalley.com>:
    >
    >> Arnt Karlsen wrote:
    >>
    >> >On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:16:38 -0600 (MDT),
    >> >"Jacob Anawalt" <jacob@cachevalley.com> wrote in message
    >> ><1141.192.168.1.4.1064344598.squirrel@scsi-burn.office>:
    >> >
    >> >
    >> >
    >> >>Compare this to the "dog chasing cars" method of inventing a new
    >> >>filter rule that looks through the MIME data to decide if this is
    >> >>the latest worm you don't want or the kissing picture that you do.
    >> >>Sure it's cool to be a geek and figure out the rules. If you like
    >> >>doing this, do it.
    >> >>
    >> >..another option is "blow up the road": http://www.ordb.org/submit/
    >>
    >> I laughed at this at first, taking it as a "Jacob, this is about as
    >> dumb an idea as blowing up the road to your house", but then after
    >> seeing the link was to their open relay form, I was stumped.
    >>
    >> Do you mind shedding some more light on this for me if you were not
    >> trying to be light hearted? Thanks.
    >
    > ..why spoil the fun? ;-) Spam etc needs relaying "roads" to travel
    > to your box. ORDB also accepts email reports rather than this, uh,
    > "massive" web form, and I would think mailfilter or fetchmail or
    > somesuch can be a workable source for a mailto pipe.

    Doesn't some spam come directly from an individual running SMTP from their
    box to yours? I'm pretty sure this is the case for the W32/Swen@MM's email
    spreading methods.

    >
    > ..a third idea is a to "first check if the same spam relay has been
    > reported by someone else", ORDB has a 200 host report cap, and
    > reporting the same box half a bazillion times a day would just DOS
    > ORDB, which is not quite what we wanna do. ;-)
    >

    A bitter irony is that we aren't using anything like ORDB to stop email
    because others users don't trust it to not block email they want to get.
    They heard stories about occasional blockings of places like AOL, and they
    have friends set on using those ISP's.

    I'm going to try the suggestions I've seen on the list by running S/A on
    one domain. Maybe I can show the other users that it will be OK to use RBL
    filtering of email. I like the ideas I've read on having S/A trigger
    firewall rules for obvious spam.

    Still I'd like to find some better way of sharing my email address without
    feeling obligated to process all email sent to me in full. If there is a
    good way of doing this, it would help not just my situation but also users
    who like to post to lists and usenet but have no control over how their
    ISP handles email and who have limited bandwidth or quotas on their
    traffic. If many of these users were all on the same mail system, that
    mail server would benefit by not processing the DATA of list/usenet
    trolled spam/worm SMTP traffic.

    Maybe rotating email addresses is the only way. That puts almost all of
    the burden of spam prevention on my end without any special hoops for
    others to jump through and once I close an account the SMTP server gets to
    reject at the RCPT TO: stage.

    Someone looking at an old message and trying to use the old email to
    contact me would get a bounce. Hopefully I could minimize even this
    inconveniance by having an overlap of some reasonable time frame between
    opening the new account and closing the old one, and I forward all email
    from the old to the new until the old is closed.

    Maybe I could even coordinate OpenPGP sub keys used to sign my
    coorispondance to expire on some interval, and my .sig could say "If the
    public subkey for this digital signature is revoked or expired, I've
    changed email addresses."

    Any rants on how inconveniant those methods would be if they wanted to be
    nice enough email me? :)

    Next month's news: "A new email worm that attacks only users of OpenPGP
    key servers by pulling down their public keys and emailing all their
    identities." *sigh*

    I'll keep trying things and if I get some more mail server side wild
    (possibly bad) ideas, I'll post it to the debian-isp list.

    -- 
    Jacob
    Trying out SquirrelMail
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  • Next message: Henning Moll: "Re: revoking public key"

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