[NCLUG] SpamAssassin Testimonials?

[J. Paul Reed]

On 23 Jul 2003 at 22:19:28, Bob Proulx arranged the bits on my disk to say:

> Impressively large numbers.  Are you using any RBLs too?  If not then I
> suggest using a list of open relays and blocking them as well.  That
> might cut your numbers down significantly.  With open relay lists there
> is very little collateral damage since the tests are fully automated.

I, and many others, have problems with RBLs because whenever you have a
central organization determining what constitutes spam and how much of an 
address block to block, you have a political problem.

There are tons of examples of people getting caught in the crossfire
because some stupid RBL blackholes a /16 which happened to be a colocation
provider like he.net, and they won't *listen* when you tell them that
you're a he.net colo customer, but you're not a spammer and you don't have
an open relay, and he.net made a mistake in getting the circuit shutdown
and they're really *not* friendly to spammers. They just assume you're one
of the spammer's underlings or something.  In these cases, you're just
screwed and there's no way around it. 

To me, with something like RBLs where the "solution" is worse than the
problem, it's like that cliche about terrorism: the spammers have won. 
So as a rule, I don't involve myself (or my users) in the politics that are
RBLs.

But SpamAssassin rocks. If we could just come up with a mere perl script
that handled the SpamMERAssassinating, we'd be set. :-)

Later, 
Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. Paul Reed -- 0xDF8708F8 || preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
To hold on to sanity too tight is insane.   -- Nick Falzone, Pushing Tin

I use PGP; you should use PGP too... if only to piss off John Ashcroft