Re: spam

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rik van Riel wrote on 2000-05-04 15:46 UTC:
> NL.linux.org already has pretty good spam filters.
> 
> I'm using Orbs (with some sites whitelisted), RSS,
> DUL, RBL, a daily downloaded list of known spammers
> and some "extra" taboo strings in majordomo.cf

I hate taboo strings. Several of my perfectly adequate postings on UTF-8
topics were rejected already in the past by such a filter at
nl.linux.org. Such naive countermeasures tend to do *much* more harm
then good. A mailing list server should be fully 8-bit transparent and
not forbid certain substrings in the content.

There is however a neat and effective spam prevention technique related
to character encodings (to get back onto the topic): Almost 100% of the
Asian spam that I get contains bytes > 0x7f but *no* MIME header to
indicate the character set. It seems that the widely used bulk mailers
do not support MIME at all. I'd have no objections if mailing list
servers would block messages with 8-bit chars but no MIME headers. They
are either spam or unrenderable malformed messages or both.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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