Spam fighting tools - TMDA

[Fraser Campbell]

On Tuesday 20 April 2004 14:33, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:

> Thats why these various anti-spam tools shold be able to distinguish
> between spam and viruses. In case of at least most of viruses there should
> be no response while in case of ordinary spam - possibly a response could
> be send (possibly only, since in these cases "From" is forget often as
> well).

Definitely this is a very important point.  There's nothing more annoying than 
brain dead virus scanners that claim you sent a virus, spam tools need those 
smarts as well.

I filter out viruses before invoking tmda so that is not an issue for me.

As for sending out confirmation requests in response to spam I don't think 
forging is as big a problem as it's made out to be.  I've probably sent 
around 10,000 confirmations out since I started using TMDA and I haven't 
received a single complaint.  I don't think joe-jobbing is that common.

If joe-jobbing becomes common then TMDA will have a problem.  Right now here 
are the oldest 12 sender addresses from my TMDA queue:

  gatewsm-CmkmPbn3yAE at public.gmane.org
  VUWFXSCJ-uAjRD0nVeow at public.gmane.org
  qep4fjj-xNqYQefT3flZroRs9YW3xA at public.gmane.org
  nhuqb-pwzc5pxyuMTQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
  Maillist6-KDQ+jmlQ3inR7s880joybQ at public.gmane.org
  rachaelvanwagenen-hNvUgg5JYwQ6GGFevw1D/A at public.gmane.org
  Isabella-qwrLpM8gnlLIrURfT66hzQ at public.gmane.org
  uysxrtvfv-zkJH4PR2EqW8rjiVs5Nzzw at public.gmane.org
  YYDPYYJRX-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
  asxgf-mFe5D6lgLcsfQhBXOYzAIA at public.gmane.org
  qtx9umap-JWnk4yrJws3k1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org
  lcrekvp-c1jrFrVrlIA+Va1GwOuvDg at public.gmane.org

I'd be willing to bet that not a single one of those addresses is a legitimate 
email address that was joe-jobbed.  I spent quite a lot of time when I first 
setup TMDA looking at the email addresses that were sending spam, rarely do I 
see an address that might be legitimate (granted I am guessing).  Since I've 
received no complains I choose to believe that (at this point in time) 
joe-jobbing is a non-issue.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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