[TAG] Writeup on Spam filtering and BLUG archives

[John Karns]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Rick Moen so eloquently said:

> 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.

Yeah, Sean doesn't seem to make the distinction in his writing that SPF is 
directed more toward controlling spammers ability to forge mail 
origination domains, in contrast to filtering incoming spam.  I also 
didn't care too much for the tone of the writing, which seemed to be 
intended to serve more along the lines of a way to generate demand for his 
consulting services than as an informative document on how to *implement* 
effective spam filtering.  However, he does also mention "greylisting" as 
being effective, and gives a link for DL.


> 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."

Hmm, I had wondered about the ethnic origin of 'Moen'.  My mother's family 
name was Maasebye.  I *think* I spelled it correctly - they "americanized" 
it to 'Bye'.

-- 
John Karns