[GTALUG] Spam is basically dead

[ac]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2017 21:20:07 -0400
David Collier-Brown via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> Cisco owns IronPort, who owns spamcop, but neither provide any money
> to spamcop. Spamcop used to be partially supported by CES, but they
> bailed.
> Spamhaus is a different company, and is arguably evil.
> 

and, to add clearly: Spamcop does not charge money to get removed from RBL

Spamcop is also not perfect, no single RBL is.

For effective spam control, figure out which 10-20 of the almost 500 Public 
and International RBL's lists your specific spam the best.
(I have included the list of known and considered 'ethical' Rbl's in the six steps :) )

Spamcop is just one RBL and, for example, Spamcop does not list
twitter.com - which is probably the largest spammer that still gets
spam through filters. - Yet, there are many many International RBL's
that do list twitter.com for the spammers they are - so, my clients have
to specifically white list twitter.com domain, if they wish to receive
email from twitter.com, same can be said for facebook.com - these
multinationals use/leverage emails to grow and/or engage their
'products' or 'users' or whatever they are calling them.

Corporate/Institutional spam and spam from 'public' email providers
like @google is still problematic. But if you configure spamassassin
properly, it adds to the 'score' of incoming emails and that, together
with reputation, is what stops/identifies almost all spam. 

Plus as you said: Report to Spamcop and other reporting rbl's :)

I have many accounts and traps and the only reason those accounts still
get spam is to collect data... 

Then, ethics:
People on 'shared hosting' where the host considers themselves to be
'bullet proof' and/or ignore spam complaints - should move their
hosting to an ethical provider. Clients are becoming more educated and
once you point out that they are hosting in a really bad place (and
maybe show them examples of the rubbish their 'host' is relaying on the
Internet) in my experience eventually they move their hosting... 

Once ISP's start figuring out that they are actually losing clients
because of poor abuse management it becomes a 'money' thing and the
winners are everyone...

And also, who still uses a single RBL for dropping/bouncing email? - Are
there still ISP's or email admins that use any RBL for 'drop/bounce' ?
RBL's should be used for 'scoring' not for bouncing....

I think this is the 'secret sauce' - to use 10+ ethical RBL's for reputation 
scoring - assign 'points' to each RBL (larger email providers should
setup dns caching) and then to also scan the email characteristics for 
additional scoring...- and to allow your clients to easily white list anyone 
and to easily black list anyone...

So, spam is basically dead :)

Andre