[OpenJade-devel] Re: mailing lists and moderation

[Nick K. <ni...@we...>]

On Sat, 15 May 2004, Ian Castle wrote:

> > Is it possible to set it to just reject mail from people who aren't on the
> > list (with an informative response to them to that effect)?
>
> Not sure. But it would be a bad thing as most of the emails would be
> sent to either non-existent addresses, or to people who didn't actually
> send them - as spam is invariably generated with a fake "from" address.

That's what you get with a traditional 'bounce', and makes them
effectively unusable on the public 'net today.  I've never had such a
message from sourceforge, from which I infer they don't permit
this particular abuse (or if they do, it comes in a format my
spam filter recognises for what it is and rejects).


But if non-authenticated addresses are rejected at the SMTP level
with something like
   "550 Address not authorised - see http://whatever."
then only the real sender will see it.  And it has the advantage that
spammers aren't going to go through their millions of rejections, so
it really is only targeted at legitimate senders who get rejected.

It could also reject anything with attachments matching the usual
microshit virus patterns .(pif|scr|exe|com|rar|cpl|vbs|hta|zip)
and anything sent *by* an antivirus program bouncing that kind of thing.


Now, on a related note, this list has been seriously broken of late.
Anything outside plain ASCII comes with bogus characters that won't
display, and in Pine abort the entire message.  Furthermore, the
web archive at sourceforge.net appears to be dead - possibly the
software running it got broken at the same time.  Did something
change in OpenJade, or is it all sourceforge's fault?


-- 
Nick Kew

Nick's manifesto: http://www.htmlhelp.com/~nick/