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Re: [LUG] Spam not reaching its intended audience



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On Sunday 21 July 2002 11:45 pm, Simon Waters wrote:
 Simon, still getting spam to his SMTP message id's as found on
web sites - I might follow Theo with the if you really sent Theo
a message please confirm to get whitelisted approach - how well
is it working?

i've not got a single spam in 8 months since i've been using it.

Apart from, *amazingly* one spammer who had the cheek to confirm it, i was 
gobsmacked, replied to him, then made sure his ISP got informed, placed the 
mail on razor, and banned his IP at our upstream routers (he appeared to have 
a static ADSL ip)- that stopped him from spamming me again :p

The other problem is of course, some people could possibly not reply, or 
bother to reply.  tmda has a utility, 'tmda-pending', that when run shows you 
all the outstanding emails that havn't been confirmed - of course this 
contins all the spam, but a little modification and it hides any with the 
"X-[AnlX|Notnet]-Spam-Flag: YES".  I then run through any that are 
outstanding (which is rare).  Of course this means that if anyone sends me a 
mail that our systems think i spam and they don't reply to it, i don't see it 
- - but i really think people who send mails that have a spam hit of 5 or more 
*and* can't be arsed to reply i'm not that interested in anyhow.

looking at procmail stats, it seems i caught over 800 mails last week as spam 
- - and there isn't anyhting in tmda as pending that shouldn't be, except....

The other problem i used to get was customers emailing me directly about a 
Notnet/ANL issue, when they should be mailing support.  While i'd really love 
to be able to attend to every customers request, problem and question, if i 
did that i'd sepnd my whole days sorting them out.  By having the filter, it 
also informs them to mail support@[anlx|notnet] where the charming support 
team can handle things, and i can carry on with my job of looking after 
thigns in general, and handling 3rd level support.

The only problem with that is that mail to support@ seems to have increased 
dramatically.  Maybe it's because the sites that contain the addresses got 
harvested *lots*, but more likly is some spammers are actually checkling 
email replies for addresses - this really wouldn't supprise me with the 
idiots.

as a side effect of the filter, the ammount of auto-replies i send out and 
bouce is pretty high, so any mail that is generated by the spam filter only 
has 2 attempts at delivery, one immediatly, and one after 12 hours.

Considering the bounce is imemdiate as soon as someone sends the mail and 
*all* their mail servers are down, they really should sort thigns out if they 
want me to reply to them and it's legit.

all in all, i'd say it's saved me a good few hours per week, and i've only 
ever had one abusive moan about it, until i explained to them why.  

I don't think there are many mails i've lost - the only one i ever noticed in 
the pending queue was a certificate-ready email from BT that got flagged as 
spam, after i looked trhough all the spam because the certificate details 
didn't arrive.

hope that helps.

~ Theo

- -- 

Theo Zourzouvillys
http://zozo.org.uk/

Be cautious in your daily affairs.
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