Re: faked from addresses getting through to my lists

On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 11:42:57AM -0400, Charlie Summers wrote:
> At 10:43 AM -0400 6/15/04, Terry Todd is rumored to have typed:
> 
> > What I'm wonndering is if anyone has done anything to beef up the
> > dist file or accept file format so it checks for more than just
> > the email address of the subscriber.
> 
>    You just answered your own question. The stock SmartList contains only
> email addresses within the dist file (although it allows for some additional
> information, that information is not captured by the stock SmartList), so you
> can NOT check for "more." Feel free to code the additiona, but you'll quickly
> realize you have yet another problem...
> 
> > a dist file entry something like this
> >
> > "Senders Name" <[email protected]> 192.168.1.1 (comment)
> 
>    Which would be impossible to mail _to,_ which is the central purpose of
> the dist list (have a ball rewriting choplist to deal with stripping out the
> email address from that line). Also makes no sense at all, since most people
> on the Net use dynamically-allocated IPs instead of fixed IPs, so your idea
> of tagging everyone to an IP (even a C or B block) is futile. You'd be
> rejecting valid submissions routinely, ticking off your subscribers.
> 
> > I had been thinking of using SmartList as a spam filter

OK forget I ever suggested using smartlist as a spam filter.
I've tried many many other spam filtering solutions.  None of them work 100%.
So I wrote my own that is essentially the same thing as what I suggested
here.  It is a whitelist of only those I accept email from.  It works.

The original problem is spam got through to a smartlist mailing list
by header information being faked.  How can that be prevented?  
What do others using smartlist do to prevent this from happening?

Terry Todd


> 
>    SmartList is not designed to be a spam filter. It is a mailing list
> distribution package. If you want a spam filter...use a spam filter. To
> protect SmartList, pipe the mail from rc.local.s00 to whatever spam filter
> you choose.
> 
>    If you run your own mail server, there are hundreds of solutions (RBLs,
> content filters [yuck], massive blocking of dynamic IPs in the access
> database, etc., etc). If you are on a shared server and don't control your
> own mail server, use one (or more) of the many procmail/perl solutions out
> there. Why would you attempt to rewrite mailing list distribution software to
> a spam filter, when you could do what you suggest above with a single recipe*
> in your personal .procmailrc file anyway? It's like using your email client
> as a word processor to write a novel; you might get it to work, but it'll
> cause you no end of unnecessary grief when OpenOffice is available to make it
> more efficient. Right tool for the right job.
> 
>          Charlie
> 
> 
> 
> 
> * A recipe like...
> 
> :0	# Yeah, no escapes, I know, I'm in a hurry
> * ^From.*[email protected]
> * !^Received*192.168.1.1
> /path/to/home/possible_spam.txt
> 
> 
> 
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