Re: TMDA ( was Re: Hmmm... )

["cmulcahy@xxxxxxxxx" <cmulcahy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Be careful of anything that automatically replies to anything.
Just sending RFC-compliant bounce messages can lead to a
denial-of-service condition ( on qmail, anyways ) since most spam ( that
is to say, most email ) has forged ( generating additional bounces ) or
unroutable ( queue-clogging ) return addresses.
You are amplifying your bandwidth attrition.

Also, the last time I looked at TMDA it worked by invoking a new Python
interpreter for every piece of mail that it handled.  This sort of load
profile can blow up an otherwise capable internet server.

I think TMDA is more of a client-side solution.

mulc

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 12:32, Stephen Paskaluk wrote:
> On Thu, 27 May 2004 18:58:40 +0200, Erik P. Skaalerud wrote
> > Matthew Dillon wrote:
> > >     I hate spam.  Sigh.  I disallow the more common Content-Type:
> encodings
> > >     used by spammers, like multipart/alternative, but I've been allowing
> > >     multipart/mixed because a number of DFly posters use it to
> attach patches
> > >     and such.
> > > 
> > > 					-Matt
> > > 					Matthew Dillon 
> > > 					<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > Matt, have you considered using a anti-spam solution that has 
> > a better chance of catching these? for example,
> >  www.mailscanner.info content-scans for sendmail, and it 
> > supports spamassassin, clamav etc.
> > 
> > Erik
> 
> I can't say if it's doable or not, but using TMDA to challenge posts
> from non-subscribers seems almost ideal for preventing this.
> 
> For anyone not familiar with TMDA, it's a mail filtering tool that will
> send a simple challenge back to the sender (ie. "Hi, I'm TMDA, please
> respond to this to ensure you're a real person who wished to post to the
> DragonFly kernel list"), and also provides whitelisting (so not everyone
> needs to be challenged).  It has more features, but that pretty much
> sums up how it would be useful to keep spam off of a mailing list. 
> http://tmda.net is their home page.
> 
> --
> Stephen Paskaluk
> stephen@xxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.ekkobsd.org/~stephen
>