[TriLUG] postfix spam blocking

Kevin Hunter hunteke at earlham.edu
Fri Dec 16 16:13:46 EST 2011


At 3:52pm -0500 Fri, 16 Dec 2011, Matt  wrote:
> 1 - Isn't the header only option built into Exchange systems and the
> user can select download only headers or full messages?

Heh.  Let me first remind you that I'm *not* an email professional. 
Merely a slightly (mis)educated user.  I've never used Exchange, but if 
my 10-seconds of Google are on target, that is in place after the email 
has been received by the Exchange server from the original sender.  My 
little scheme says to never collect the body of the message _from the 
original sender_ until the MUA/user specifically requests it.

> 2 - pushing the cost onto the sender is one of the concepts
> considered to combat spam.  The intent was to make it undesirable to
> send bulk unsolicited email and the mechanism was to place a tax on
> each sent email such that a normal person or business would never see
> a charge or one that was more than a small token, while a spammer
> would get a massive one.

Ah, you're thinking "legitimate" spam.  And you have me there.  If there 
is a technical way for legitimate companies to count this and fairly pay 
for this according to the law then great.  But when I think of spam, I'm 
also thinking of spam that comes through zombie computers.  It seems to 
me that while this type of spam could still just point to the IP address 
of random zombie computers, this would be much more noticeable to the 
legitimate parties involved, who would then feel more compelled to fix 
an issue (e.g. if their computer/inet was much slower).

Kevin



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