Jason goes out of control

Jason goes out of control

[Jason Molenda]

I finally gave up and went whole-hog with the open relay & dial-up RBLs.
I now have sourceware+egcs set up to check the following RBLs upon
receipt of an e-mail note:
 
  MAPS RBL   http://maps.vix.com/rbl/       Third-party relays
  MAPS DUL   http://maps.vix.com/dul/       Dial-up lines
  DSSL       http://www.imrss.org/dssl/     Dial-up lines
  RRSS       http://relays.radparker.com/   Third-party relays
  IMRSS      http://www.imrss.org/          Third-party relays
  ORBS       http://www.orbs.org/           Third-party relays

The MAPS RBL is the most conservative TPR blocker (ie it blocks the fewest
sites).  RRSS is also fairly descriminating.  ORBS waits for spam to go
through a site before that site gets added to it.  In contrast, IMRSS
scans the Internet looking for mail servers that allow open relaying.
I'm under the impression that IMRSS is a little bit of a political
hot potato, so we'll see how long I stick with it.  On the good side,
I don't think it really does much testing of indirect relays (indirect
relays is the part of ORBS that causes me no end of headaches.)

MAPS DUL and DSSL should ideally be redundant; I'll see how the log files
look after a while.  People should not be sending mail directly from
a dial-up account; they should be going through their ISP's mailhost.
The http://maps.vix.com/dul/ page has a good discussion about why it is
reasonable to expect this behavior from users.


What pushed me over the edge was the GNATS databases I've started
setting up.  They are getting spam (two spams for the automake database
within two weeks after it went on line. sheesh!) and I really don't want
to have GNATS databases full of spam mail.


If any of these lists turns out to have been a big mistake, I'll
disable it.  IMRSS may turn out to fall into that category--stay tuned.

J
Free the Software!