Spam Filtering: October 2005 Archives

Over a year ago I posted some reflections on email filtering based on our experience as an ISP Justin Mason's latest post reflects on some of the issues that I had hinted at: False Positive ‘Reports’ != FP Measurement As he underlines in one of the comments:

The problem is, if you don’t receive the message text, it can be damn hard to figure out if the message you just blocked was spam or not — therefore they seem to just assume it was spam!

I got postgrey (greylisting for postfix) working without too much difficulty a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately I managed to screw up smtp-auth in the process.

I grabbed a screenshot of the latest AIB phishing attack earlier this morning In most instances phishing sites are taken down by the hosting provider, however in this instance the domain has actually been revoked from the root nameservers. The domain's status has been changed by the ICANN registrar to:

status: hold,infringe-3rd-parties

which is interesting. Does this mean that registrars are going to be more proactive in fighting phishing?

Phishing fraud is not going away. As the fraudsters expand so do their list of targets. The latest one that was reported by Alex French, CEO of Bitbuzz, targets AIB:

Am I the only person who finds reciprocal link requests generated by automated mailers and nasty little spam robots annoying?

Ebay is famous for selling the weird and wonderful, but when you have somebody offering to sell you his spam you really have to wonder. The listing may be taken down by the time you read this, but it's basically an offer to send you spam in case you don't have enough of your own :)

A lot of mail server admins have been forced to implement some form of spam checks at the SMTP level. Some of the implementations are quite demented and probably do more harm than good, whereas others are extremely sane.