Re: Reclaiming the list from spammers.

[Dan Brosemer <odin@svartalfheim.net>]

Due to the positively insane number of spams getting past the spamassassin
filters I set up on all the email lists, and this list in particular, I've
decided to take drastic measures:

1.  Switching the mailing list software to smartlist from majordomo.  This
allows me to tie in all sorts of filtering rules at various points in the
mail processing.

2.  Disallowing all HTML mail.  From this point on, if you send an html
message to techies@lists.cleannorth.org with HTML formatting, it will be
rejected and you'll get a nice message explaining why.  (Note that I'm
talking about fancy formatting, not including an URL).

If your mail client sends HTML messages (probably a default setting you just
forgot to change), now is the time to fix it.

3.  Finally, I put a baysean mail filter in the way.  This is seeded with a
40MB database of spam so it can discern spam from ham quite accurately.

In addition to this, we are continuing with our current anti-spam practices:

1.  Blacklisting hosts that send us spam.  We maintain our own blacklist and
use the distributed spam blacklist at http://www.spamhaus.org/ as well.

2.  Teergrube:  We keep the connection to blacklisted hosts open for as long
as possible to tie up their machines and reduce the number of people they
can spam.  Today, we tied up spammers machines for 36 hours.

3.  Spamassassin scans all incoming messages and sends anything that scores
too high to the bit bucket.

Thanks for bearing with us during this mess.  It hasn't been fun, but I hope
this will help somewhat.

(Note this only applies to techies@lists for tonight, but in the near
future, the above changes will be in place for all Clean North lists).

-Dan

-- 
"Burnished gallows set with red
 Caress the fevered, empty mind
 Of man who hangs bloodied and blind
 To reach for wisdom, not for bread."  -- Deoridhe Grimsdaughter