On 18/04/04 14:54 -0400, Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote:
<snip>
Rather than making mail filters poll a central site (these have in the past
been
victimized by DDOS attacks), maybe one approach here might be to set up a
Yahoogroup that could be used to rapidly distribute these "disreputable
domain
names" and IP addresses along with a utility which would add them to the
recipients' HOSTS files (and from there, to their incoming mail filters).
This approach has been proposed previously on net.admin.net-abuse.email.
You will need a way to verify that the data is correct. Suggestions were
PGP/GPG signing the message.
Quite a few DNSBLs already allow access to the raw zonefiles via rsync.
It should be fairly easy to convert that data into a format usable by
the local DNS server.
<snip>
[reformatted line wrap]
You have to use Bazooka and Adaware besides.
One of the things that has been SINGULARLY unhelpful toward addressing the
problem of overloaded mail servers is this plague of HTML-burdened
"alternative" copies of E-mail messages. It is rare indeed that these
provide genuinely valuable additional content; instead they usually are
loaded with gratuitous graphic gizmos, Web bugs, possibly malicious
scripting, misrepresented clickable links, and text-as-image designed
to evade content filters. While I'll accept that some folks can argue
that their needs for HTML-burdened E-mail is legitimate, certainly a
lot of it is not. Mail with HTML-burdened attachments
is typically 3x-5x larger than it would be as plain ASCII text.
If HTML-burdened attachments were removed from non-whitelisted senders'
E-mail (and this would catch at least most of today's spam) then such
mail would be 70-85% smaller in volume than it is today.
Isn't modifying mail in transit bad?
This is all documented. It needs to be a new standard. Feel free to
point offenders to <http://www.camblab.com/nugget/htmlmail.pdf>
(or send it to them)
I don't want to see any solutions that result in some "authority" deciding
what one can and cannot send.
Right, only community consensus should be applied. It is doable.
The whole discussion needs to be recast from "make the victims pay by
coming up with solutions (filtering etc)" to "make the offenders pay".
The only way to do that is to refuse mail from spam-enablers. It fixes
the problem immediately. Again: <http://www.camblab.com/misc/univ_std.txt).
I do agree with this point. However, the business community does not
want to agree to that standard. They would rather pay for a lot of spam
rather than possibly lose a single email. And until businesses
understand that blocking the spam enablers makes sense, this is not
going to happen.
Spam would stop worldwide within DAYS if most of us, instead of whining
and coming up with impractical technical or legal 'solutions', would
agree to do on the Internet what society does in every other field
of human activity: ensure that actions have consequences. It is THAT
SIMPLE. (Any parent knows.)
Consequences to whom? Sender identification methods attempt to identify
the sender so that appropriate measures can be taken against the sender.
Blocking based on DNSBLs stops supposedly spam supporting senders.
For most users, the need is to stop the spam without blocking legitimate
mail from the same host. This is what drives the concept of filtering
over using a DNSBL.
Devdas Bhagat
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