What are your thoughts on.....

"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
...

Why you replied by email, I don't know. However, as far as the blocked
domain goes, it's likely he has nothing to do with that.


I had info which I did not want to broadcast publicly but which I felt might
be directly useful to the poster of the question.

In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
My ISP provides this kind of "service", and once I found out what was going
on, I told them to disable it for my email. I don't get any more spam than
I used to, and I don't have friends and family complaining that they can't
send me email anymore.

Lucky you. I get around 120 emails a day - on average, 118 are spam.

SpamAssassin 2.60 does a much better job at filtering the spam than I
can do by hand. Filtering by hand is prone to false positives too. I've
also employed the SBL-XBL (a realtime listing of compromised machines,
as well as those owned by the worst spam-gangs) to reject as much as the
obvious spam as possible.

There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).
--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
Lucky you. I get around 120 emails a day - on average, 118 are spam.

You only get two pieces of email a day that aren't spam? Why do you even
bother? You don't have any reason to even use the Internet for mail, as
near as I can tell. I don't see what your anomalous situation has to do
with this sub-thread though.

SpamAssassin 2.60 does a much better job at filtering the spam than I
can do by hand.

It sure does. Like I said, SpamAssassin already filters out everything that
might have been blocked by the black-hole list my ISP was using.

[...]
There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).

You, like several other people, are not bothering to read what I wrote.

In only ONE instance is the blocked email coming from a friend's own mail
server. All of the other blocked email messages WERE sent through their
ISP's mail server and they ARE blocked by the black-hole list service.

I don't know why this is so hard for you guys to grasp. You keep claiming
that the service isn't doing what I say that it does do. I know what it
does, I spent a huge amount of time learning about it (when the bounces
first started happening, I didn't have any idea why), and I know for a fact
that it is blocking perfectly legitimate email for absolutely no good
reason.

The whole concept is paternalistic crap. It punishes ISPs, especially the
largest ones (since they have the most exposure), even if they are doing
their best to keep spam off of their networks, and causes no end of
headaches for legitimate users.

Spam filtering is well and good but any proper solution will NEVER EVER
block legitimate email. One single false positive is simply unacceptable.
It is better to accept more false negatives instead.

Pete

In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
snip: only 2 legitimate emails a day/why email?
I only get a couple of phone calls a day. I still have a phone.
Difference is my phone doesn't get spammed. Even on days where I get ten
or eleven legitimate emails, having to pick them out from over 100 spam
emails is not feasable so filtering has to be employed.

I don't know why this is so hard for you guys to grasp. You keep claiming
that the service isn't doing what I say that it does do. I know what it
does, I spent a huge amount of time learning about it (when the bounces
first started happening, I didn't have any idea why), and I know for a fact
that it is blocking perfectly legitimate email for absolutely no good
reason.

No, I'm not. I don't make any claims as to what your ISP does. My
article was about a particular approach with RBLs, and that was to use a
combination of the SBL-XBL and SpamAssassin. The former does not block
ISPs smart hosts. The SBL-XBL is one of the more conservative RBLs -
it's not SPEWS.

The whole concept is paternalistic crap. It punishes ISPs, especially the
largest ones (since they have the most exposure)

The SBL-XBL doesn't list any of the large ISP's smarthosts. AOL et al.
get delivered fine. AOL is also doing useful things like putting SPF
(http://spf.pobox.com) records in their DNS zones so I can tell if mail
claiming to be from AOL really is from AOL before I accept it (a lot of
spam comes with forged AOL headers. SpamAssassin can score against
forged headers).

Spam filtering is well and good but any proper solution will NEVER EVER
block legitimate email. One single false positive is simply unacceptable.

This is impossible. If you get a lot of spam, even filtering by hand still
gets false positives - either that or you spend several hours a day
making doubly sure you're not going to hand-filter ham as spam, in which
case email becomes cost-ineffective. I know that before SA/SBL-XBL I
accidentally deleted emails because they looked to me like spam.

To be honest, I wouldn't consider email a reliable method of
communication thanks to the spammers. Things like SPF will help as it
will mean we can tell if From: headers are forged from the get-go, but
unless ISPs get more agressive about stopping the spam problem (giving
users firewalled access by default instead of anything goes - definitely
blocking outbound port 25, rate limiting their smart hosts so
residential users are limited on how many emails they can send per day
etc.) it's only going to get worse.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

Dylan Smith wrote:

I only get a couple of phone calls a day. I still have a phone.
Difference is my phone doesn't get spammed.

One of the advantages of living in Britain. If I get only two calls a day, I'm
lucky. Most of the calls are spam. I pay an extra $7.50 a month for "caller ID"
to allow me to avoid most of it, and we're on the national "don't call" list,
which is supposed to stop most of it (and which the telemarketers simply ignore).
One of the most annoying things about it is that, if you *do* answer the phone,
many of these guys have software that delays the response (to avoid answering
macines, I expect), and they don't even answer until you've said "Hello" three
or four times. I've gotten to the point that I say "Hello" once and, if nobody
replies, I hang up.

George Patterson
Battle, n; A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would
not yield to the tongue.

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004 23:42:47 GMT, G.R. Patterson III wrote:

I pay an extra $7.50 a month for "caller ID"

*whow* I pay EUR 7,- [1] [2] for the whole service, including mailbox,
caller ID, etc. etc.

#m

[1] well, this is not much, therefore I have to pay higher rates for calls.
20 eurocent per minute - no matter where I call to within the country,
billed in 30 second increments. No passive fees for receiving calls, but
this is standard.
[2] about EUR 20,- per month brings you rates down to 1 eurocent per minute
within the same network and to land based phones.

--
A far-reaching proposal from the FBI (...) would require all broadband
Internet providers, including cable modem and DSL companies, to rewire
their networks to support easy wiretapping by police.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5172948.html

In article , Dylan Smith
wrote:

There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).

"no legitimate reason"? huh?

--
Bob Noel

In article , Bob Noel
wrote:
In article , Dylan Smith
wrote:

There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).

"no legitimate reason"? huh?

If you want to run servers at home, get a proper business account
instead of using a consumer account. Or get a virtual private server
somewhere (they aren't expensive, especially when you consider the
electricity costs of leaving a server-class machine on 24x7) The amount of
legitimate email vs Windows worms and spam I get from dynamic IP ranges
is so tiny that it doesn't even register as noise. During the Swen
outbreak, I was getting a couple of Swen emails per minute. Frankly, I'm
fed up with it. Use your ISP's smarthost or if you really insist on
running your own mailserver, pony up for a business account, or get a
VPS and run your own SMTP server there.

Still, I use the SBL-XBL because it doesn't just indiscriminately block
all ranges, just the ones that are particular problems.

I also reject any email with a Windows executable at the DATA stage.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"