Re: Get your share of $1.4 million!

[D. Stimits]

"Greg A. Woods" wrote:
> 
> [ On Friday, April 6, 2001 at 21:59:41 (-0600), D. Stimits wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: Get your share of $1.4 million!
> >
> > How does garbage like this join and stay on a list? I get a ton of spam
> > that indicates it is routed through the gnu.org lists.
> 
> Almost all of the spam I get these days comes directly from gnu.org.
> 
> > Can advertisers
> > and bulk spammers be removed?
> 
> Officially, no.
> 
> After sending similar complaints months ago (Jan 23, 2001) to the FSF I
> just finally tonight got an "official" reply from the vice president of
> the FSF, Bradley Kuhn, stating (in a style typical of RMS actually) that
> they wouldn't block any e-mail, especially not based on third party RBLs
> and the like, because they might accidentally once in a blue moon block
> one poor fool's legitimate message because his MTA was accidentally
> mis-configured and accidentally became an open relay or some such.  The

Someone who has become an unwitting relay through root kits should be
banned. But bans can also have a link for
"address@hidden".

> FSF folks don't seem to realise that everyone knows how to resend a
> message once they've either fixed their mailer or chosen a new service
> provider who takes more careful care of their mailers.
> 
> He effectively went as far as to claim that the FSF does not believe any
> e-mail message can be considered as spam.

One of those messages, which had all information that was able to be
altered, but not the routing info, which is hard to remove; in this
case, gnu.org was used as a relay to send a virus (well, really a
worm...I sent a copy to cert.org and it was verified as a malicious
payload). I sometimes wonder if perhaps gnu.org itself has been root
kitted, it has become so efficient at spawning spam.

FYI, I get about 3 spammers banned per week. I turn it over to the
reply-to address, and if the full header has any indication of the
originating ISP, to them as well. About a fourth of those I get email
accounts banned from I manage to get banned from their ISP as well. In
the case of something like online gambling, it borders on forwarding the
email to the FBI for their own viewing.

> 
> Pure B.S. if you ask me!
> 
> Oddly this policy of theirs to freely re-distribute all spam to all of
> their mailing list subscribers isn't clearly stated on their web site or
> on the subscription confirmation messages they send out.
> 
> Personally I'm going to find other forums which are managed in a much
> more responsible way and which treat their intended community with far
> more care and respect than the FSF has come to do.  I will soon be
> unsubscribing from all public gnu.org mailing lists on which I continue
> to receive spam.  I encourage everyone else to do likewise.  If everyone
> leaves it won't be very hard at all to find willing hosts for alternate
> forums in which free software topics can be discussed without intrusion
> from known spammers, open relays, and such.  In fact I'd hope most such
> new lists will be set up so that only subscribers may post freely to
> them.  If the list managers should wish to sort through unsolicited
> postings by non-subscribers and forward on only the non-spam then they'd
> obviosly be welcome to do the job!

I am afraid that I am also going to have to abandon all gnu.org mailing
lists, due to the combination of spam and malicious payloads it relays.
I understand the problem of bans that might ban too many people, but
there is a need to add a ban on particular senders. Better yet, perhaps
something similar to a email virus scanner, but with spam signatures of
known spam, and a means to submit mail for possible inclusion in the
anti-spam filter.

D. Stimits, address@hidden

> 
> --
>                                                         Greg A. Woods
> 
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