Flutterby™! : My Spam Answer(?) 2006-08-17 20:18:10.692704+00

My Spam Answer(?)

2006-08-17 20:18:10.692704+00 by meuon 4 comments

I think, as I look through my previously low spam e-mail address business centric: mikeh@.. and find 40+ spam messages for every ham message. All do to ONE of my customers getting infected, and that e-mail address ending up on the evil people's lists..

I think that I will be building a new server soon, and my thought is that EVERY customer, client, contact, e-mail list, website.. etc.. will get a unique e-mail address, like: mike-danlyke@geeklabs.com would be what I give Dan. Then when I get lots of dreck to: mike-danlyke@.. I add that e-mail to my blacklist and it goes away. I don't want to have to whitelist, or TMDA people, I want to issue e-mail addresses at whim that work, but tag the originator of that address, and let me blacklist it as needed, and publically flog the deserving. Thoughts?

Brian Warner's Petmail is leap towards doing this in a cryptographically controlled way, but it's a replacement for SMTP, not something that can be done on top of it.

I just use Gmail for everything and let Google sort out my Spam. Works pretty good so far. Also, Gmail now allows you to have multiple email addresses associated with the account and send from each email address (i.e., personalities).

#Comment Re: made: 2006-08-18 02:09:26.032444+00 by: meuon [edit history]

The ticketting system (CAPTCHA) is like TMDA for me.. and requires clueful users. As for dumping the load on Gmail, personally that could almost work (but I so dearly love PINE for e-mail) but professionally, running a small hosting business and handling LOTS of e-mail for customers. It's not a real solution.

I use pretty much the same system you outline, although not *quite* to that extreme (individuals don't get unique addresses, just businesses and web sites and the like). It's worked quite well for me until recently; when spammers started spoofing one of my domains as their return address using randomly-generated addresses, I couldn't really "turn off all addresses that aren't acceptable", because I hadn't kept track of all the addresses I had genuinely used. Sending 100+ messages per minute through procmail brought my server to its knees, and I had to abandon the spam filtering solution I had used (and tweaked) for several years in favor of Spam Assassin, which my host supports but which I find doesn't work nearly as well.