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Archiver > Listowners > 2002-02 > 1013178951


From: "Andrew Billinghurst" <>
Subject: Re: [LO] Re: [Please Read] RootsWeb Spam Handling-Phase I
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 01:35:51 +1100
In-Reply-To: <p0510030eb876bc16c4d0@[208.25.48.52]>


[Andrew is slogging through his mailbog so please excuse the latent
comments.]

James,

This is a multi-level response by RootsWeb, and needs to be for best
results. We take the approach of multiple sieves and hope that each
layer of sieve reduces the garbage.

The stopping of abuse@ posts to admins may only be 25% but it also
allows us to now not have to worry about that component at all. It
also means that it clears my mailbox considerably (and it has) as
many ISPs rejected our abuse@ mail to admins, thus it ended up in my
mailbox, thus I had to wade through sorting out ISP spam rejections
from truly AWOL admins. Also IMO some ISPs block us out solely for
the spam that we forwarded in abuse@ messages, which is a "make work"
scenario crawling on your belly explaining what we are doing and why.
Time has marched on from when we originally started bouncing the
identified abuse@ mail.

Other steps are to reduce the garbage coming into the mailhub, and we
have taken a number of glorious steps to cut out some of the open
relay ISPs, and we are currently still building on this strategy.
This strategem will produce some false positives as we will block out
a minute percentage of valid users, but the rejection message says,

550 Access denied. For more information, write to .

and we have left open a channel so that the only address that these
people can reach is

More behind the scenes work is going on in terms of discussion papers
and product analysis, methodology comparison. For us to address
other aspects of the garbage that continues to grow.

Regards Andrew


On 24 Jan 2002, at 23:47, James Shuman <> wrote:

> At 1:43 pm -0700 1/24/02, Frank Kurchina wrote:
>
> [snip]
> >Your Spam detective catches one Abuse Spam message for every 24 or
> >so that are posted to my Mailing Lists.
> [snip]
>
> and several folks wrote in to challenge that statement. But I got to
> thinking that what was meant was that for every message coming from
> <> saying "we blocked some spam from your list"
> there were "24 or so" that were NOT blocked and so had to be dealt
> with otherwise.
>
> So, I kept a little unofficial count this evening since about 5:30,
> and I find that during that period, I received 7 messages from
> <> and 25 "bounce" messages that turned out to be
> spam -- including one pornographic one.
>
> I hadn't kept count before, but I was vaguely aware that I receive
> many, many more "bounced" spam messages than polite messages from
> <>. It will be nice to not get those 7 messages per
> 5-hour period any more, but those other 25 get to be a bore,
> especially when I've been receiving some of the same ones for weeks
> -- and have repeatedly forwarded them to <>.
>
> Is there any hope of a speedier turn-around in blocking some of these
> *other* "frequent fliers"?
> --
> _________________
> James Shuman
>
> _________________
>
> ______________________________


--
Andrew Billinghurst <>
Genealogy mailing lists: http://lists.rootsweb.com/
Ancestry.com--Your #1 Source for Family History Online
http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=702&sourceid=1241

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