| sean finney on 26 Mar 2004 15:34:02 -0000 |
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On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 09:51:38AM -0500, jeff wrote: > Otoh, if the message was from their bank or best friend, I'm pretty sure > they'd return a one-time confirmation message. I'd definitely grant > anyone that courtesy. I'm having a hard time figuring out what's so > terrible about it. what's so terrible is that whenever a new virus or spam blast comes to your address, your whitelist "please respond to this message to be added to my whitelist" message gets sent in response to each message (assuming that the from address in each message is unique and forged). in the case of viruses, this is on the same level as "we couldn't deliver your message because it has a virus in it" type bounces. the traffic that these "bounces" creates effectively doubles the amount of wasted bandwidth, often making additional victims of recipients whose addresses were forged and causing more headaches for mail admins everwhere. it's one thing to inconvenience your friends/co-workers/clients with this stuff, but there's not a way i know of to prevent this from inconveniencing other unrelated netizens. i feel the responsible thing to do is to manually manage your whitelist. set up spamassassin/whatever rules to give lower scores to folks who aren't in your list, and use other less obnoxious/obtrusive technology to cope with the spam, such as RBL's, denying dynamic/dial-up mail relays, hosts with no reverse dns, et c. sean Attachment:
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