[SATLUG] anti-spam effort

[Travis H.]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 02:32:51AM -0600, Charles D Hogan wrote:
> our addresses.  Looking at the message archives on satlug.org, it 
> wouldn't be all that difficult to REGEX the "me at here.com" for the 
> sender back to "me at here.com".  Take a look at the html of a handful of
> messages in the archive, you will see a pattern easy to REGEX for that.

It's too weak an obfuscation; probably they already do things like
remove NOSPAM or SPAM from the address, and convert " at " into @
for the bots they operate (or in the google queries they try).

> The address I use for the mailing list is an alias that has never been 
> used for anything but this list.  Yet it still receives SPAM.  It never 
> received spam while I was just lurking, only after my first post.

Just out of curiousity, what MUA do you use and how do you manage
changing the address when posting to the list?  I'm using mutt and
it should be easy to tell it "respond using the address this was
delivered to" so that my addresses are trackable to the list or web
site that I used it on, but I haven't found the right config yet.

Note that I tend to use a specific email for both sending to and receiving
from a list, as many MLMs are configured to not allow posting by non-members.
I think satlug is an exception in this regard.

> One way to get around the spammers would be to set up one address that 
> you use to post to the list, and another that you only receive to.  Once 
> your "post from" address is confirmed by the list, quietly drop all mail 
> going to that address into /dev/null.

Better yet, use it as a spamtrap address; blacklist anyone who does deliver
to it.  That's clever, but it rather breaks email when someone tries to
send you a reply that they don't want to go to the list (happily, I can
report that mutt has a "reply to sender" command that ignores reply-to,
as well as a "reply to list" command that sends ONLY to the list, avoiding
sending redundant emails out-of-sequence to posters, along with the
conventional "reply to all" command).

>  Obviously, this won't work if you still wish to get mail on the 
> address that the vile vermin have already gotten ahold of.

Addresses that are already on the lists are great for spamtraps.
I have my spamtrap address on the main index.html of my web server,
along with a nice note telling spammers that it loves to receive spam!
-- 
"Cryptography is nothing more than a mathematical framework for
discussing various paranoid delusions." -- Don Alvarez
<URL:http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/> -><-