"Jonathan A. Zdziarski" <jonathanat_private> posted to incidentsat_private on Tue, 27 May 2003 at 20:54:02 -0400: > IMHO the only real way to combat spam is by the content iself I respectfully disagree. From an empiric scalability perspective, spam is 'lots of the same thing', or bulk messages, whether it's a large number of substantially similar messages with BI>20 or a large number of substantially similar unsolicited emails. Bulk unsolicited emails convert our disk space and bandwidth for the spammer's gain. This is called 'theft by conversion', not advertising. Now, most spam is also objectionable because it is fraudulent, commercial, illegal, and/or in violation of the sender's AUP ('breach of contract'), but not all (I've seen charitable appeals via spam). Conversely, most objectionable email is spam, but again not all. In most cases, a bunch of complaints about similar objectionable emails can be used to justify calling those emails spam. According to RFC 2821 Section 4.5.1 at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt , SMTP systems are expected to make every reasonable effort to accept mail directed to Postmaster from any other system on the Internet. In extreme cases --such as to contain a denial of service attack or other breach of security-- an SMTP server may block mail directed to Postmaster. However, such arrangements SHOULD be narrowly tailored so as to avoid blocking messages which are not part of such attacks. If you content filter the Postmaster mailbox along with your other mailboxes on a continuous basis (in the absence of a denial of service attack or other breach of security), and you don't reject the messages with a good reason, you will be subject to listing for being ignorant of RFC 2821 per http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/policy-postmaster.php . Content filtering can also be bad because of context - it has been seen to reject discussions of: chicken breasts and thighs; Breast Cancer; Erectile Dysfunction; and objectionable email. While I use content-based rules (if you can call header fields content) to process some of my email, those rules only serve to sort and categorize my email, not to reject it. In this manner, all of the email that comes to me from this list ends up in one folder. I also combat, or fight, spam on a daily basis, and my favorite tool for doing so is SpamCop at http://spamcop.net . Finally, please take note of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of spam at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=spam - it makes no mention of content. Thanks and Best Regards, Jeff. My mailbox, my server, my property, my rules. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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