Re: excessive bounces

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 27 May 2004, Lars Hecking wrote:

> o gnu.org has a prohibitively high volume of email, and SA/Bayes require
>   massive resources. Therefore, the volume of mail going through SA or
>   any other tool must be limited.

Bogofilter does a fine job of Bayesian filtering and is 50-100X faster 
than SpamAssassin.  Surely it does not offer the extra features of 
SpamAssassin, but using it would help considerably, and should keep up 
with gnu.org performance requirements.

> o Excessive whitelisting: all current gnu.org subscribers should be white-
>   listed, so that their email bypasses anti-spam. Yes, that'll still leave
>   the problem of subscribed spammers, but I believe there won't be too many.

This does not work at all.  A huge amount of email I receive are 
bounces or anti-SPAM notices from forged emails sent using my address.
More than likely I have received many SPAM emails claiming to be from 
Lars Hecking. :-)

> o Ruthless use of DNS blacklists before mails reach anti-spam. Most of
>   spam on GNU lists originates from "known bad boys" - Korea, China,
>   dialup/dyn-ip hosts, Comcast, *bell etc. Recommended reading:
>   http://makeashorterlink.com/?D20312968.
>   sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org alone would probably work wonders.

Usually this is good, but lately I have been noticing that substantial 
email is arbitrarily rejected due temporary local DNS issues or bugs. 
It is not pleasant to be on the wrong end of this.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen