Administrivia: Spam Prevention Measures (Was: Thank You!)

Note: If you are having trouble unsubscribing and you cannot contact me
via email (for whatever reason), look at the bottom of this message for
a "WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS" method of getting a hold of me.

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:33:54AM -0400, Alan Vinh wrote:
> Anyone putting up a service to help others while expecting nothing in
> return is doing the community a great service. Please keep up the good
> work Mike and THANK YOU for maintaining this list.
> To unsubscribe is easy enough, there is no need for harsh words - just
> leave quietly!
> Regards - Alan

Guys... Thanks for the kind words.  I've thought, a couple times, about
shutting the mailing list down since most of the chatter is about SSH on
Windows and I hardly use Windows for anything anymore.

But, each time that happens I see more activity on the list, so I decide
to leave it up.  It's really not an administrative burden and I'm very
glad you guys find this helpful.

In Adam's defense, it seems that he attempted to correctly unsubscribe
from the list, but never received the confirmation email.  Instead of
calmly trying to handle the situation, he became hostile and reported me
to the FTC.  I guess he assumed that I was either an "absentee admin"
(his words) or I was intentionally trying to spam him.

Neither, of course, are the case here.  Fighting spam takes a ridiculous
amount of my time.  I employ several methods of preventing the delivery
of spam to this list and to the mailboxes on my server.  Among these are
blacklisting and greylisting.

With blacklisting, I use several methods to obtain lists of known
spammers and tarpit those hosts.  (See OpenBSD's spamd
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/?query=spamd for more info)
If you have having problems sending emails to this list, the list
manager (to un/subscribe) or me, perhaps your server landed on a
blacklist.

With greylisting, if my server hasn't recently "talked" to your server,
your server gets a temporary failure message.  If your server retries
in 30 minutes (the standard), your message will be accepted.  Many large
email providers use broken methods to deliver mail.  They use a pool of
SMTP servers that rotate on retries.  Since greylisting uses the IP
address of the sending server (along with the sender email address and
the recipient email address) to determine when a message should be
delayed or delivered and these pools use different IP addresses for each
host, it is theoretically possible that the message NEVER gets delivered
if the pool doesn't retry with the same IP address within the timeout
period.  For large known providers, I make an effort to whitelist their
pools, but not all providers make that information easily accessible.
Usually the downside to greylisting is that your message takes ~30
minutes to be delivered.  It sucks when I place an online food order and
don't get the confirmation email for ~30 minutes (and their system ate
the order and we assumed it was on the way).

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS:
If you are trying to contact me and my server is simply not receiving
your messages, go to http://erdelynet.com/ and pick some post to my
website and leave a comment.  Comments are moderated and I'm a clever
guy and should be able to figure out that you don't actually mean for
that comment to be made public.  But if you're concerned that I may not
understand, put in the comment that you tried to email me and it didn't
work, please don't publish this comment, ...
Also, note the new footer.

Thanks for listening.  And, please discuss SSH.

-ME

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