[PLUG] spam and white lists

Ed Sawicki ed at alcpress.com
Sat Oct 4 00:04:02 UTC 2003


On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 20:13, Aaron Burt wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Ed Sawicki wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-10-03 at 19:03, Aaron Burt wrote:
> > > There are ways to classify (and filter) spam that are about as effective
> > > as simple whietlists, but are much more flexible and involve much less
> > > fiddling.  And keep in mind that the From: address is generally faked,
> > > often with domain names and addresses that belong to legitimate users.
> >
> > We're talking about a large volume of mail. One goal is to
> > turn away the spammers before they consume our bandwidth.
> > Techniques that require us to receive the message before we
> > decide that they're spam are not acceptable.
> 
> I understand.  There are several techniques that work well at that stage.
> I'd recommend you look a little further into modern spam-fighting tools
> and techniques (especially RBLs) before you invest too much effort.

I already use RBLs and RHSBLs as well as numerous black lists.


> One bandwidth-saving technique that I'm told works surprisingly well is to
> give a temporary (4xx) error to unknown senders.  Spammers rarely retry
> errors, so if the sender retries, it's probably OK and can be whitelisted.
> (And have its mail subjected to further classification.)

This is a good idea. Do you know of software to do this?





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