Re: [CH] OT - more spam lately?
Scott Peterson (scottp4@mindspring.com)
Sun, 09 Feb 2003 09:55:13 -0800
At 11:30 AM 2/9/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I have been using Mailwasher for some time. It "bounces" SPAM back into
>the face of the sender. I get to define what is SPAM and/or friends - by
>use of filters, blacklists and whitelists.
>
>It works by going out to my mail, pre-filtering and returning the results
>for my inspection (and possible override and/or criteria
>modification). Then it will bounce and delete what I consider to be SPAM.
>I then use my favorite mail reader as normal.
Mailwasher is one of the nastiest programs around because of the bounce
feature!
What it does is send mail back to the address in the FROM field of the
email. That problem is that the FROM address is almost always forged to a
non-existent address or that of someone the spammer is mad at. So when you
"bounce" the mail, at best, you're sending out mail that can never be
delivered, at worst, you're helping to mailbomb an innocent person.
In the few cases where the address is not forged, all you are doing is
confirming that your address is a real person.
To make it appear that it's working, mailwasher forges the address of
postmaster@ your ISP into the from field. That way you don't see how little
good it does because the bounces you send do not come back to you when they
fail or are refused. The problem is that POSTMASTER is a real account. The
person using the Postmaster account generally ends up having to write a
script to delete anything that mailwasher sends in self defense. So there
is a very good chance that even legitimate spam complaints sent via
mailwasher will be ignored.
Most system administrators would like to reserve a special room in hell for
the author of this program as he continues to offer this feature in spite
of many complaints.
Most system
Scott Peterson
God is real, unless declared integer.