Getting tough with SPAM
I can deal with SPAM sent to webmaster@eclipse.org. That box gets over 1,000 e-mails per day - some of it is from the eclipse.org servers, some from the committers and the community, and most of it is garbage. But the abuse is getting out of hand:
- sending junk to every mailing list (SPAM gets rejected, but some lists bounce to webmaster)
- sending junk to the mailing list owners (most of the time that goes to webmaster)
- sending e-mail to a list (knowing it will bounce) but using webmaster as the “sender” (or some other eclipse.org address)
- sending e-mail to a list (knowing it will bounce) but using someone at Amazon (or any other domain) as the “sender” - this results in massive mailbombs to (domain) saying “You must subscribe to the list …”
Something needed to be done — so I enabled tougher restrictions on senders and recipients, and I enabled BlackLists. We didn’t do this in the past because we didn’t want to risk missing any e-mails, but we can’t afford to go on like this in the e-mail unfriendly world that we know.
If your DNS isn’t configured properly, or if you’re on the same network as a spammer who’s listed on a blacklist, your e-mail may be rejected. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the world of Internet e-mail.
Posted December 5th, 2005 by Denis Roy in category: Uncategorized
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3 Responses to “Getting tough with SPAM”
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Ed Burnette Says:
December 6th, 2005 at 10:23 pm
I was wondering if you considered a challenge-response system?
Michael Scharf Says:
December 7th, 2005 at 10:46 am
Hi Denis,
there was an article about email spam in a German computer magazine some time ago. One “trick” they use to avoid spam (as far as I remember) was to pretend the mail server (temporarily) cannot receive mails from addresses that send an email for the first time. Good servers will automatically try again. Mass spam senders won’t.
I don’t know if something like this is applicable in your case…
Michael
Denis Roy Says:
December 7th, 2005 at 9:59 pm
Michael,
It’s called greylisting, and I read about it, but haven’t had a chance to try it. Our SPAM seems to have decreased to a trickle since implementing blacklists - even for the webmaster@ address, which is published just about everywhere.
Ed, I’ve never heard of any. Server-side? It would have to be compatible with all the mail servers that communicate with us. I tend to get crud if mail doesn’t work.
Thanks for your comments, guys.