On Mon, 29 Sep 1997, Steve Emms wrote:
This is all complete drivel; take it elsewhere, preferably /dev/null
Actually, Daviid's comments are perfectly relevant to procmail. The fact
you don't like it is not enough reason for the rest of us to drop it.
Auto-bouncing mail from the unknown is never a good idea. Auto-bouncing
mailing lists is an even worse idea. If something qualifies as spam in
your mail filters, /dev/null it.
The only people I have ever auto-bounced were compleate idiots. And I
hooked the bounces up to random text generators so they could have fun
duelng with the bot. My biggest regret is that I never saved the duels.
These days I could probably sell them as a book. :)
On Mon, 29 Sep 1997, David W. Tamkin wrote:
I wrote to Biow, using his bypass word in the subject, to tell him what he
did, and guess what: his bypass word didn't work and I got the whole thing
back with the same "guilty-until-proven-innocent" rejection.
So yes, Biow is a bozo. I pity what digest-mode readers of this list will
receive until he is kicked off.
On the mailing list I run there is a zero-tolerance policy for rejecting
list distributions as suspected spam. Do it once and you are gone. Most
such idiots don't give bypass words (though Biow is the first I've encoun-
tered who gave a bypass word and then didn't honor it) and many use much
ruder language than Biow did; when I tell them why they are dropped from the
list, I usually get another "you dirty spammer" letter back.
One did reply, saying "the computer made a mistake." I told him that his
computer did exactly what he programmed it to do. That infuriated him and
he replied with a flame against me (for thinking that humans program com-
puters) and the list (which he had never seen; even if he does store sus-
pected spam for examination, his "you dirty spammer" was an autoreply to the
welcome letter for new list members, and he had never been sent any actual
list content).
Just a few more examples of why whitelisting is a shortsighted move and a
bad
policy. It is one thing to give extra priority to mail from known friends;
it is quite another to assume that all unrecognized senders are spammers.
Well, I do mail this way:
whitelist
mailing lists
Basic de-spamming (freinds, X-mailers, bad addresses, etc.)
procmail list
Serious despamming (a lot of procmail list matches these)
Score whats left. Scores over million, deleted. Rest to gzipped
to junk-box.
Dump rest (without an acknowledgement or vacation message) into inbox.
--
Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.