SPAM was RE: ***TiVo Mailing List - SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT***

["Mark Hetherington" <mark.egroups@xxxxxxx>]

> We do use SpamAssassin at the user level. However, it is
> important for us to reject spam at the SMTP level.

I could not agree more. After many years on the net some days I block
more email at the SMTP level than I actually receive. This is despite
being somewhat careful with my "real" email address but thanks to
the
intense archiving of information that a few people have taken on, my
real address remains available to the increasingly complex harvesting
systems from the days when SPAM was not the problem it is today.

> > just rejects it. Has the added bonus that once the spammer
> detects a
> > couple of bounced messages from your mailserver, it'll stop
> sending to
> > it
>
> That is not our experience of spammers. They don't care how
> many bounces they get. Their only overriding priority is to
> spam EVERY e-mail address that they have.

I have to disagree there. I have several thousand individual rules in my
personally maintained blacklist, many of which have stopped triggering
since I began rejecting at the SMTP level rather than silently
filtering. It is not of course a 100% effective solution, but it has
made a noticeable impact on the level of incoming spam. I guess it
depends on which automated agent they use and where they source their
names as to how effective the practice is but it is certainly not
without benefit.

The other advantage of rejection of course, is that should a real person
have a message rejected, they are likely to actually read it and if
important, attempt communication in another manner rather than merely
assume the message arrived.

To my knowledge I have yet to bounce a valid email.

> Furthermore, most
> spam come from poorly defended but legitimate e-mail servers.
> These servers are as much a victim of spam. In fact, they are
> worst off as they end up being listed in many spam black
> lists and their mail queues are usually clogged up with
> thousands, if not millions, of bounced spam.

My sympathy with the inept Systems Administrator was exhausted many
years ago. It is not difficult to secure a mail server and an
Administrator incapable of doing so, should not be doing the job. Some
friends of mine, that work in IT services, have actually discovered a
new business area in securing email servers, since a number of their
business customers employed a Systems Administrator incapable of the
task.

Mark.