Subject: RE: [Asrg] Trustic anti-spam system closes down because it doesn 't work

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 18:43:56 -0700

> Is it really, though?  As far as I know, there was an occurrence that
> moveon's newsletter was being marked as spam by Razor -- but Razor has
> a periodic problem of legit newsletters being marked, for quite a few
> newsletters.

I know that organized campaigns of this type exist in other forums. They
have even hit slashdot which is meant to be resistant because you don't know
who has mod points.

One group put out a message to ask folk to read some of my slashdot posts
and mod them down before people saw them. Unluckily for them I happened to
be on the distribution list...

People go to bizare lengths to silence people they disagree with. I once had
a pamphlet censored by a student's union because it was NOT racist. They
interpreted the union policy against censorship, opposing the NUS 'no
platform for racists' policy in the narrowest possible manner. 

I think that we have to be very carefull when considering the information
sources a spam solution depends on. All information sources should be
considered untrustworthy unless there is good reason to think otherwise. If
there is an auditor the actions of the auditor should themselves be open to
review.

		Phill 

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From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 06:41:25 -0700

> There are over 400 DNSBLs that *I* know about. It would be completely
> impossible for it to happen, even ONCE on the vast majority of them.
> The criteria for listing on most lists are yes/no bits, such as "is
> it an open relay?", "is it an open proxy?", "is it a dynamically
> assigned IP address?", "is the IP space in the USA?", "is the IP
> address in China?"... "does this mailing list do confirmations?".  

Some lists are based on empirical criteria. But the lists that are usually
used for blocking mail and result in problems are based on complaint
reports.

Empirical lists have also been abused - see the ORBS saga.

> In May, your argument for the demise of DNSBLs was that the root
> servers could be attacked because someone could joe them and get them
> listed on a DNSBL, now it's censorship of the political lists.
> Neither have any basis in reality.

No the argument was that blacklist proceedures are so sloppy that many have
blacklisted IP addresses that could not possibly be spam addresses.

If you know how to send email FROM a multicast address I would love to hear
it.

Perhaps you could try responding to the arguments I made rather than putting
out marketting spin and FUD.