On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 09:52, Jack Broughton wrote:
> Hearing this sort of thing makes one think "there's gotta be a better way"!
>
> Much the way people's spam filters can have whitelists, blackhole servers should
> have a "unlikely to be spam source" list such that reputable outfits like
> OpenSRS would not have to jump through these hoops all the time. I know that
> even companies that are anti-spam can have their mail servers comprimised and
> become a source for spam but given the grief that is caused at OpenSRS with
> regards to compliance to ICANN etc. one would hope that they could be placed on
> a list that would only allow a mailserver on that list to be blackholed manually
> and not automatically through a disgruntled client's submission. Surely in
> those cases if a real hooman bean was brought into the loop it wouldn't happen.
> (And yes... I'll stop calling you Shirley. :)
>
> Thanks for your diligence with such issues Edward.
SpamCop doesn't filtering ANY submissions.
They figure that since the listings expire so rapidly, unless they get
more submissions listing the same source, that any potential harm from
false submissions is minimal. That's their justification for not doing
anything about it.
It wouldn't be a problem if ISPs didn't irresponsibly block email based
on a single entry in any of the services they checked. A scoring
system, such as Spam Assassin uses, is a much better way, where you can
assign a weight to each service's result, and a threshold for when an
email is flagged as possible spam. And then it flags the email with a
header tag, that then lets the end user easily filter the message to a
separate spam folder that they can peruse from time to time, or not, and
flush out as desired. Using a database backend for Spam Assassin's user
configuration would even let individual users tweak the weight rules,
whitelist domains and specific email addresses they want to receive
email from (Even if it is marketing email), etc. But ISPs seem to be
taking a more aggressive approach of outright blocking, and increasingly
they are blocking based on ever decreasing quality of results. And more
and more of them are taking the approach that ALL marketing messages are
spam, rather than just those that do not involve a pre-existing
customer/user/etc relationship.
It's a somewhat distressing trend really, and the more prevalent it
becomes, the more legitimate email that will be blocked, such as renewal
messages from OpenSRS.
-- domainwhiz@yahoo.com <domainwhiz@yahoo.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:37:40 EDT