Re: Hardening lists against spam attacks

[Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>]

Frank O'Dwyer writes:
 
 
> > [...] the drivel that comes from some of our more prolific posters is
> > best handled by filtering by the list members themselves.  (I currently
> > have 3 of them going directly to the trash.  Perhaps aga should get
> > kickbacks from Qualcomm.  He managed to sell a copy of EudoraPro.)
> 
> It would be nice if each user could install filters on Majordomo itself.
> Not only would we not need to buy Eudora Pro, but we wouldn't have to
> pay to download messages we didn't want to read, and without having
> to employ a moderator (censor).


Bad idea.  It's tough enough on the host running a list with 1500 or
2000 people on it.  Adding outbound filtering for each user would
be a real burden on the list host.  It's better to distribute the
processing by making the user agent (or mail transport that's delivering
to the user) do the filtering.

In addition, a filtering majordomo will only 'protect' the lists that it
serves.  I don't know about you but I get a lot of spam from all sorts
of different sources.  I need to have a filter anyhow.  It's not hard to
add some more rules to filter out each lists's bozos.  It's a lot
simpler to do that than it would be to upload filter rules to each
of the 10 or 12 listservers I get mail from.


There's also a security issue.  How are you going to set it up so
that I can't say hack Tim May's filters to send him nothing but posts
from Phil H-B and Detwiler?  Yea, you can do it with passwords or
PGP or whatever, but it's still more overhead.  Why bother with it
when you don't need to?


-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
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