On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 12:28, MJ Ray wrote:
On 2004-05-04 11:44:06 +0100 Matt Parker matt@mpcontracting.co.uk wrote:
Report them to the black lists. [...]
I regard most blacklists as broken too. They variously allow vindictive forgers to DoS people, or harm innocent customers of a slow-to-respond ISP without giving enough details for the innocent customers to "encourage" their ISP. They're useful input to scoring systems, but postmasters ought not to use them to refuse email, IMO.
I disagree, but I guess you thought I would ;-)
I find them to be the best method of spam prevention. As for the forging report issue, you do have to be careful which blacklist(s) you point your server at, since some have a reputation for listing on sight and then being slow to respond (I don't use SPEWS for that reason). In particular you have to "trust" them to get it right. That comes with reading online reports and watching your logs carefully with the "warn" setting before you go for the full on reject. I find that SORBS is good for filtering out mail from dynamic DSL (which is always spam - if you want to run a mailserver you should have a static IP), and SpamCop is good since they seem to be more responsive to the "DoS" problem than the other lists.
Matt