it's just great!

[Matthias Andree]

Petr Danecek <danecek at ucl.cas.cz> writes:

> Hello,
> first of all, I'd like to thank to all the developers of bogofilter. Our
> site is heavily spamed and bogofilter works like miracle. 
>
> I was just thinking of adding another feature. Let me explain. Many spam
> emails which we receive use as an address nonexistent user names. In
> such a case the server tries to bounce the message back. However, most
> of the spams use also forged from addreses. Therefore lot of our server
> time is spent on sending spams forth and back, after finaly dropping the
> spam email into postmaster's mailbox.
>
> The feature which I would like to add, is to parse a message and telling
> if it is a spam or not without printing the message itself. I could use
> this with qmail and its bouncesaying and avoid many unnecessary bounces.
>
> What do you think?

Two thoughts:

1. there are scanners that wrap around qmail-queue and are able to
   reject mail during the SMTP session, avoiding the bounce.

   Just omitting the -p option from bogofilter will make it stop print
   the mail, and if you need some output string, look into -T. The man
   page has all the details.

2. rant: vanilla qmail 1.03 has not been updated to the requirements of
   the hostile arena that its commercialisation has made of the
   internet. Every commerce tries to egoistically and ruthlessly exploit
   the Internet in its own interests, without any respect for others.

   qmail needs to be patched all over to make it usable. One dictionary
   attack by a spammer and a vanilla qmail is effectively dead, drowned
   in bounces, and queueing and preprocessing these is awfully slow.

   André Oppermann's "silly qmail queue syndrome patch" may help a bit
   but doesn't fix the problem that qmail accepts mail for nonexistent
   users in the first place.

   There is the "goodrcptto" patch series as well which may help a bit
   but increase administrative burdens.

   My best bet was to abandon qmail years ago and migrate to Postfix
   when it was still beta. Postfix 2.0 is very mature and the upcoming
   2.1 version will be a killer application.

-- 
Matthias Andree

Encrypt your mail: my GnuPG key ID is 0x052E7D95