[100374] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: Misguided SPAM Filtering techniques

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Pooser)
Mon Oct 22 14:29:59 2007

Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:04:23 -0500
From: Dave Pooser <dave.nanog@alfordmedia.com>
To: nanog list <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <471CC4A9.2020005@labrats.us>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu


> And that is probably just fine, as 99% of the true spam comes from email
> addresses (and often doamins) that either do not exist, or often are not
> configured to receive email.

I call BS. I ran sender-callout verification on my primary email server for
a while (before I became convinced it was mildly abusive, and stopped) and
typically blocked 2-3 spams per day. In fact, I had more FPs than legit spam
blocked by that method.

> If you didn't send the the email, why bother confirming it?
> Aren't you also adding back to the problem?

Absolutely I am. If you're going to try to offload your spam filtering to
me, I want the process to cause you as much pain as possible (within ethical
limits, which is why I won't forward your email

> Even if you confirm your email address, that's all that spamarrest is asking
> for.  If the email address is valid, then it's done its job.

Sender callouts will verify addresses without requiring any action from the
end user. If you must [ab]use my resources to do your job, please have the
common decency to use my (abundant) hardware and software resources rather
than my (much more limited) wetware resources.
-- 
Dave Pooser, ACSA
Manager of Information Services
Alford Media  http://www.alfordmedia.com



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