[ltp] OT: About third-patry anti-spam protection (some people just don't get it...)

[Brian Ronald]

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On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 21:41 +0100, Marcin Trybus wrote:
> So I get this here notice that this here "Darrin" uses some fancy=20
> "protection".=20

I agree completely with every point in your post.  There are other
reasons for not using challenge based anti-spam, too.  Spams fake their
sender, meaning that random people can get those notifications for every
spam sent to an account protected by such.  Since you can't trust the
From: field anyway, this form of protection is attempting to solve the
wrong problem.

I'll come clean here and admit that I used ASK (Active Spam Killer) to
protect my email for a bit.  It was a personal installation (run by
procmail), and yes, my spam problem vanished overnight.  Then I thought
about the random messages my server was firing off every time it got
some spam, and I thought about those whose mail I'd not receive because
they either wouldn't respond to a challenge, or couldn't receive the
challenge (they're often filtered as spam themselves).

It also gave rise to problems signing up to web sites.  They don't tell
you in advance which email address the confirmation email will be from,
so you can't whitelist them.  This means you either have to turn the
thing off for a bit, or receive all your mail and put it in a spam bin
for later perusal.

So, for the good of my conscience, the integrity of my inbox and the
sanity of the internet in general, I removed my ASK installation and
moved anti-spam back one layer to my own server in London.  It is listed
as the mail exchange for my domain, and greylisting works a charm - with
spamassassin and conservative blacklists dealing with the rest.  When I
get spam now, it's a genuine surprise!
--=20
Brian Ronald (Brianetta)            http://www.ppcis.org/
_________________________________________________________
I didn't want to hurt you, but you're pretty when you cry

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