New version of mhonarc installed

New version of mhonarc installed

[Jason Molenda]

FYI, I upgraded mhonarc to 2.6.0.  It has one new feature that may
be of interest -- it can be configured to munge e-mail addresses
in the body of messages.  Until now, mhonarc would only munge e-mail
addresses in the headers.  I'm uninterested in enabling the 
body-email-message-munging because it seems too likely to fail, but
I figured I'd mention it.

There was also a discussion on the mhonarc mailing list over the
past couple weeks about address munging schemes.  Most involve
protecting the archives with well-known passwords that humans can
trivially figure out, but that would hose the search engines so
that's not so cool.  One person had an interesting suggestion:

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/mhonarc-users/2003-02/msg00040.html

Which uses some clever HTTP trickery that the spam harvesters probably
can't get right now.  But they could eventually figure it out..

(Incidentally, the date index at that web archive is pretty nice looking.)

J

Re: New version of mhonarc installed

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 10:55:19PM -0800, Jason Molenda wrote:
>FYI, I upgraded mhonarc to 2.6.0.  It has one new feature that may
>be of interest -- it can be configured to munge e-mail addresses
>in the body of messages.  Until now, mhonarc would only munge e-mail
>addresses in the headers.  I'm uninterested in enabling the 
>body-email-message-munging because it seems too likely to fail, but
>I figured I'd mention it.

Thanks.  I thought that munging email addresses in the body is not
something we'd consider because it would screw up ChangeLogs and even,
potentially, source code.  I know that some people use the web rather
than subscribing to mailing lists so this might affect them.

Of course, I don't know if we care.  Everything we can do to stop the
evil spammers is good.

I had a spammer today actually subscribe to the cygwin-xfree mailing list
in order to bypass the spam checking.  He unsubscribed shortly thereafter.

I'm assuming that this unsubscribe was probably a mistake, so I've
resubscribed him.  I might have to add the subscribe to a cron job, just
to make sure there are no further mistakes on his part.

cgf

Re: New version of mhonarc installed

[Jason Molenda]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 10:00:11AM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> Thanks.  I thought that munging email addresses in the body is not
> something we'd consider because it would screw up ChangeLogs and even,
> potentially, source code.  I know that some people use the web rather
> than subscribing to mailing lists so this might affect them.

FWIW, I agree.

The new version of mhonarc also handles messages with non-ASCII
characters in them far better.  Take a look at the aaaspam archives
and you'll be impressed by how many lame languages it's being
spammed. :-)  

The indexes for the current time period will have corrected
names/subjects, and the newly incoming messages will be decoded
correctly far more often now.

> Of course, I don't know if we care.  Everything we can do to stop the
> evil spammers is good.

I set up spamassassin a while back and I'm a lot less concerned about
being harvested now.  One or two spam notes get past my (conservatively
configured) spamassassin filters a day, and I can live with that.
Stopping spam sent to mailing lists is really important, but I
suspect that most folks will get access to a spam filter of some
sort sooner or later.

> I had a spammer today actually subscribe to the cygwin-xfree mailing list
> in order to bypass the spam checking.  He unsubscribed shortly thereafter.
> 
> I'm assuming that this unsubscribe was probably a mistake, so I've
> resubscribed him.  I might have to add the subscribe to a cron job, just
> to make sure there are no further mistakes on his part.

Excellent!  Although he may have been mistaken and really intended
to subscribe to cygwin.  It doesn't seem to make much sense to just
subscribe to cygwin-xfree, when you think about it -- you'd want
to know everything that's happening with cygwin itself in addition
to XFree86.  :-) :-)

Re: New version of mhonarc installed

[Christopher Faylor]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 04:58:24PM -0800, Jason Molenda wrote:
>> I had a spammer today actually subscribe to the cygwin-xfree mailing list
>> in order to bypass the spam checking.  He unsubscribed shortly thereafter.
>> 
>> I'm assuming that this unsubscribe was probably a mistake, so I've
>> resubscribed him.  I might have to add the subscribe to a cron job, just
>> to make sure there are no further mistakes on his part.
>
>Excellent!  Although he may have been mistaken and really intended
>to subscribe to cygwin.  It doesn't seem to make much sense to just
>subscribe to cygwin-xfree, when you think about it -- you'd want
>to know everything that's happening with cygwin itself in addition
>to XFree86.  :-) :-)

Wow Jason!  This is incredible.  This is *exactly* what I thought aFter
I sent this message.  I've already subscribed him for just this reason.

I love helping people.

cgf