Re: [Fwd: Meta-issue: recent spam surge]

[Martin Hamilton]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 01:04:21PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Unfortunately the powers that be at gnu.org have decreed that even spam
> shall not be blocked, filtered, or otherwise rejected by their mailers
> because they are afraid they will reject even one legitimate message
> from someone.  They seem to believe that any amount of spam is
> preferable to rejecting one legitimate message.

Well, that's one way of putting it - but the volume of sp*m has risen
to the extent that some sort of action is clearly necessary.

I would prefer to leave the final decision of whether or not to block
a message to the recipient, though this would mean that the messages
would still be expanded and delivery attempted.

To this end, I've just added ORBZ and ORDB lookups to the GNU mail hub
Exim config.

This is currently set up to add a warning header of the form:

  X-RBL-Warning:

to messages sent from originators who are in either database.

For any more significant changes, like blocking or rejecting sp*m via
RBL lookups, we'd need to discuss on the GNU system hackers list.

If people are willing to devote the time to manually approving the
blocked postings, I'd like us to try using the RBL lookups to tell
Mailman whether to freeze an incoming message for approval.

This would mean that messages from people who weren't list subscribers
would only be frozen if they were posted from hosts which appeared in
the RBL(s) - removing one of the major objections to this practice
when we last discussed it.

Cheers,

Martin