SPAM: AW: important

Rich Kulawiec rsk at gsp.org
Thu Sep 24 20:08:20 UTC 2015


On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 02:55:51PM +0200, Gunther Stammwitz wrote:
> This is unbelievable: 

Yes, it is.  Quoting back a spammer's entire message to the entire list,
including the payload, is unbelievably stupid.  It would have been
better to call this to the attention of those charged with the
care and feeding of this list, who are available at admins at nanog.org
per the nanog.org web site.  (Although even that is probably not
necessary: I presume that they're keeping eyeballs on the list and
quite likely noticed this on their own.)

Blocking mailing list spam sent by/via addresses belonging to the
mailing list is exceedingly tricky.  There are a few methods that
are modestly effective but none which present sufficiently low FP/FN
performance to be trusted without human intervention.  And those
which rely on content, like all anti-spam methods which rely on
content, can be and are defeated at will by spammers.  I have studied
this problem in considerable depth over the past several years and
have concluded that -- so far -- the only truly reliable method is
clueful list moderation with individual approval of every message.
This is, however, labor-intensive for high-volume lists and is thus
dependent on the availability of trained/practiced teams of list-owners
with sufficient available time.

---rsk



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