[TAG] Writeup on Spam filtering and BLUG archives

[Rick Moen]

[Much appreciated forwards from John Karns.  Quoted comments are not 
by John, but rather someone else.]

> Try this:
> http://journal.codeslinger.com/getentry.html?stamp=20040803_2330

Referenced journal entry is by consultant Sean Reifschneider of Linux
consulting firm tummy.com in Colorado, who as usual doesn't quite get
it:  One pretty good moron filter in these discussions is to observe and
eliminate from consideration people who (like Reifschneider) express
disappointment in SPF because implementing it doesn't reduce spam
percentage as much as they hoped.

SPF isn't intended to reduce spam directly:  Its sole mission is to
eliminate spammers' ability to do "joe-jobs".  That is, it makes it
impossible for spammers to credibly send mail purporting in envelope
SMTP headers to be from your domain, from an IP address that is not one
of your domain's MX hosts.  This is not guaranteed to immediately and 
directly reduce spam, but is nonetheless a huge step forward because it 
removes in one blow spammers' ability to hide behind my domain, yours,
and those of other legitimate senders.

> Several of the ideas discussed in that paper are discussed in great
> detail in this paper:
> 
> http://slett.net/spam-filtering-for-mx/

Author Tor Snettnes, by contrast (author of the above), is, by contrast,
right on the money.  Highly recommended.  

Tor is an ex-pat Norwegian, so he can't be all bad.  ;->  When he
proposed the above document as an LDP HOWTO on the general LDP
discussion list, he mentioned the fact that, although he currently lives
in San Mateo, California and speaks English, he's not actually an
American.  I replied:  "By the way, you say you're not American?  With a
name like Tor Slettnes?  Why, all _my_ relatives have names like Karl,
Margot, Reidar, Bjorg, and Arne, so I always considered those typical
Yankee names."

-- 
Cheers,    "Cthulhu loves me, this I know; because the High Priests tell me so!
Rick Moen   He won't eat me, no, not yet.  He's my Elder God, dank and wet!"
rick at linuxmafia.com