[TAG] More spam than content?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John Karns (jkarns at csd.net):

> Pardon my asking, but what ramifications will it have for sending msgs to 
> the list?

Major ramification:  The address for all lists will change from
*@linuxgazette.net to *@lists.linuxgazette.net .  This will cause much
the same dislocation that the 2003 domain change did.

Minor ramification:  Some desirable incoming mail may end up being
rejected as being excessively in violation of RFCs, or originating from
spammer IPs, or being too spammy or malware-like in a variety of ways.
(I classify malware as effectively just funny-looking spam and don't
really regard it as a separate category for functional purposes.)

Those are the two that come to mind.  Whether the second bothers people
tends to depend of their estimate of baby value versus bathwater value
-- or something.  Let me rephrase that:  Any antispam system will annoy
some senders who either deservedly or not got their mail either rejected
or discarded or buried deep in a spambox.

My system aspires to always reject at SMTP time and never discard or
bury -- but some sizeable amount of processed lunchmeat _does_
nonetheless get a pass from Exim at SMTP time as not being _wholly_
worthless, but instead marked by the MTA-integrated SpamAssassin scan as
"^X-Spam-Flag: YES" in the headers.

My ~/.procmailrc then _does_ bury deep the portion of that
"^X-Spam-Flag: YES stuff addressed to "rick at linuxmafia.com' -- with
pretty much zero false positives, by the way, so it seems that I have
the MTA-integrated SpamAssassin pretty effectively trained.  (Exim4
could be tweaked to reject those rather than passing them to the LDA,
procmail, but I haven't done so.)

And a small residuum of spam does end up in my mailbox, of course.


If one or two of you either think you're Exim4 gurus or aspire to be
same, I'll be delighted to give you shell accounts and put you in
sudoers to perform sundry indelicate privileged operations upon my mail
system, with the understanding that I will yell very loudly if you break
it (by telephone, I guess  ;->  ).

Or if one or two of you are merely curious and want to explore
/etc/exim4/* and figure out how it all works, I can give you a shell
account _without_ sudo-assisted ability to break things.  You'll then be
one up on me, because I perenially lack time to re-study the thing.