Filters That Fight Back

[David Relson]

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 13:53:44 +0200
Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> wrote:

...[snip]...

> If the sender address is forged, someone inserted your address or
> mine, we'd suffocate under hundreds of thousands of false bounces.

A couple of weeks back, one of the userids at osagesoftware.com received
a set of false bounces.  Since I know that userid has sent 1 or 2 emails
in the past year and receives approx 1 legit email a week, I'm willing
to bet that there was some chicanery involved.  The total number of
bounce messages was small, perhaps a dozen or two..


> The hard part is making sure that you really hit the spammer, and not
> some innocent third party. That makes me think that "fighting back"
> doesn't really work before some distributed network is established
> that lists the sites that "may be assaulted by filters".
> 
> However, the vast variety of local policies of IP and hostname-based
> black lists makes me believe this again will have two sorts of lists:
> the conservative ones that work and the aggressive ones that hit
> innocents.

Though the idea of fighting back appeals to me, I see too much chance of
error and of inundating the wrong address.  I'm against the idea.

David