🚀 go-pugleaf

[composite reply; different posters get different quote characters]

<> I have had a great deal of spam from sites in Arizona (after all, they
<> invented it)
< SPAM was around well before Canter & Siegel

I can recall only *one* spam before C&S, and it didn't have the same
commercial aims and didn't set a precedent - jj@cup.portal.com with
his "Jay-Jay's College Fund" (c.1989?).  If you know of another one,
name it.

:>> Given the purposes we use email for, losing messages is NOWHERE NEAR
:>> as bad a problem as spam.
:> the evidence, in the form of complaints to this newsgroup, does not
:> support this viewpoint
: I think he meant "we" as in himself and others using his demon account

Exactly.  Marion uses email to receive progress reports from her
patients: I use it to communicate with a relatively small circle of
people researching the same topics as me, and a few friends from way
back.  Other users get their mail forwarded here or use the machine
for sending articles to newspapers, with the general public having
no way to find out who they are.  Mail of any kind from previously
unknown correspondents is unusual.

Anyone wanting to contact Marion out of the blue will have found her
via the website, which explains how to get in touch.  Paying patients
(as opposed to typical Internet freeloaders) always phone her to make
the initial contact anyway; if you're seriously ill and looking for
professional help you'll make that effort.  So far, not one of them
has found our filters any obstacle.


: Still, I'm sure he'd be the first to complain once this putative
: "service" lost him an email he was expecting, notwithstanding his
: claims.

As I have *already* explained several times, the filters I have in
place *at present* occasionally lose legitimate email.  The tradeoff
is still in favour of having those filters in place.  There's always
some way of recovering the bounced information if the other party is
serious about communicating.


>> There is no way in Demon's present setup that I can bounce any message
>> from a user who sent more than 1000 messages to the Demon server on
>> the same day, for example.
> I take it you don't use any mailing lists then?

Several of them.  None that distribute much more than 1000 copies of
messages per day worldwide.  So this heuristic would suit us; I'm not
suggesting everybody would find it helpful.

>> I keep a list of blocked sites on my website so people
>> can tell in advance if they're going to get through.
> Assuming they would even think to look at your website.

It's the usual way people find out who I am; the other way being via a
mailing list, in which case they'll have seen my signature.

> Me, I'd try mailing postmaster as a first step (I presume that you
> receive, or at least check, all mail addressed to postmaster?)

Site blocking means no mail from sites like yahoo.com ever gets through
to any user at this site, postmaster included.

> 2 or 3 items of UBE received in the last 12 months. Average of over
> 120 emails a day received. Proportion of bounced to received mail
> about 10%

About 50 emails a day sent to this machine.  Without our filters, 80% of
them would be spam.

> Your sig.separator is still broken.

It functions exactly the way I intend it to.  It's not my problem if
you're too lazy to edit.


; At least three years ago {R} was running his own home-made smtpd,
; written in Rexx and running under OS/2, where it knew of a whitelist,
; and of a blacklist, and anything else resulted in a pop-up for a
; decision.  That decision could be assisted by fetching the article's
; headers from the POP3 server *while* the connection was still open
; to the smtpd from Demon's punt (acting as an SMTP client).

Which still incurs the comms cost of downloading the headers; given the
traffic pattern here, and given that headers are typically about 1/3 of
the total size of the message, that would still mean that more than half
of our email bandwidth would be devoted to downloading spam.

; I'm sure that if you're technically incompetent of writing such an
; smtpd yourself, it would be possible to find someone prepared to
; write it for you.

I have no *interest* in writing such an inadequate solution or in paying
anybody for it.  It would be time I'd rather spend in productive work or
money I'd rather spend on something useful.


+ How do you know that it is practical to add procmail into the Demon
+ mail setup?

I don't, but if every academic Unix site on the planet can do it, and if
Claranet can do it, it can't be rocket science.

Looks like we'll be migrating to Claranet for email, despite my initial
contact with them being rather unimpressive.

========> Email to "jc" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce. <========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html  food intolerance data and recipes,
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