Spam Control Considered Harmful

Tue Oct 28 12:59:22 UTC 1997

> I am worried about the tools we are developing and deploying to control
> spam. 
> 
> Some of them are esentially centralsied methods of controlling Internet
> content.  Paul's anti-spam feed for instance prevents users of some
> providers from seeing spam.  The user has no choice; they cannot opt to
> receive spam other than by switching to another provider.  Even worse:
> they may not even be aware that they are "missing" some content. 

Here at MegsInet, we have a procmail script called "despam"
available from ftp.servtech.com://pub/users/phoenix/despam

We put a web front-end on it so our users can turn it on and off at will.

If you have a seperate mailservers and have extra cpu cycles to burn it is
pretty much the way to go... it's totally configurable either by user or
for the entire system (only affecting users that turned it on, of course)
and has regular-expression matching to throw messages away... Plus, since
it uses procmail, it can throw messages into a file for later persual if
you so wish...

We find that this works much better than blocking them at the routers, at
the expense of more cpu power being needed on our mailservers... but then
again, it's an added feature that our customers have come to enjoy.
Plus, since it's user activated we don't have to worry about the legal issues
of us filtering content.

-- Jason
Jason Vanick ------------------------------------------ jvanick at megsinet.net
Network Operations Manager                                   V: 312-245-9015
MegsInet, Inc.        225 West Ohio St. Suite #400         Chicago, Il 60610 