Re: uklm mod-rejected psot...

On 2008-11-01, Dave J <requiem@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In MsgID<6n0ui9Fjdju7U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on 31 Oct 2008 17:45:45 GMT,
in uk.net.news.config, 'Chris Croughton' wrote:

Sorry Chris, I'm puzzled there. Why not?

Because I'm not running an SMTP server! At least, not one you can access at
all. You can contact an MX address which purports to relay mail to me, but
that's as far as you can get with tracing it without a court order to get that
mail host to turn their records over to you (and assuming you were trying the
address in my From: line you'd have to go to California to get it). All of my
MX addresses are at hosting sites, none at my own machines.

Ah, I see what you meant. It sounded as if you'd said the smtp server
wasn't loggable in some strange way. Please pardon the superficial reading
:)

I suspect you're not the only one who read it that way. I pick mail up by
other means (fetchmail mostly), as far as I know they aren't logged at the
server at all (in fact at least one of the ways I can do it would definitely
not be logged -- fetching it directly using ssh).

Looks to work much like any other, though I do like the 451 trick, I wrote
a little 'bolton' for a friend's personal server to do that. It seems one
of the least costly solutions to most mass mailer progs. Only sad bit is
that its effectiveness will certainly (eventually) drop in proportion to
popularity.

Hmm, that particular address doesn't do that (at least not for me).

Believe it or not, it certainly does.. That's if you're talking about
keristor .net (self mx'd) at least. '451 please wait 30 seconds' or words
to that effect. It then quite politely even accepts the rcpt to: if you
leave the connection open for those 30sec. I didn't check to see if it
would also work if you drop the connection and re-connect 30sec later
though I /believe/ that to be the standard behaviour (?)

Fascinating. If I telnet into port 25 there from any of my shell access
machines I don't get that. I wonder if it's got a greylist?

Because of that I assumed you actually receive the delivered messages, or
that they were at least stashed in a bit-bucket somewhere. Be a shame if
not as a dev/nul stylee receiver should really IMHO just drop the
connection without a word to save the bandwidth.

The host MTA receives everything to all usernames at that domain, it's dropped
later. That happens with all of the hosts I use, they accept everything for
forwarding. I then reject everything not in my list of known username parts
using procmail (in the case of that domain and some others this happens before
I collect the mail; in other cases it gets to my machine before getting
dropped).

However,
it does have filtering which means that mails can get dropped into the
bit-bucket (any to a username part I don't recognise, for instance, will get
binned). And a number of ISPs do similar things, including running spam
filters which just drop mail.

A number of anti spam techniques greatly sadden me, they seem to amount to
voluntarily allowing the spammers to kill the email system.
Grey listing as per aaisp is the borderline I choose. (In fact it's the
grey area <grin>)

I use spamassassin, at least two of my other hosts do the same. It does allow
some through, but has very few false positives so I rarely lose mail that way.
My main filtering is by username, that cut down the number of bounces caused
by spammers using my domain as a from address immensely.

However techniques that rely on the difference between a delivery agent
that's 'well behaved' and can follow simple standards versus automated
junk-bots that are too dumb seem to be the current height of subtlety.

Yes, that's pretty good. And most of them still let me through using
telnet...

As I muttered, it's not a solution that can hope to be of universal use
but it's rather a neat stopgap for those that know.

There's no perfect system. As long as it's manageable I don't mind.

Chris C
--
Void where prohibited by law or social customs. Your mileage may vary.
Contents may settle in transit or any other large vehicle. No warranty
implied. All rights and lefts reversed. The author is not responsible for
anything. All Hail Discordia! Ewige blumenkraft!
.

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