Re: [HACKERS] OK to send e-mail?

Thus spake ocie(at)paracel(dot)com
> solution is to make spamming unprofitable. One thing that would go a
> long way is to reverse-verify the sender's address. If the sender has
> forged this, the mail is dropped and we get the sound of one spam
> clapping :) The problem is that most sites nowadays won't verify email
> addresses. This sounds like a good project for a free relational
> database. Anybody know of any good ones out there? :)

I am running software that allows me to check for reverse DNS on a
connection and refuse SMTP connections if they don't have any. In
addition I can refuse email from known spam sites and even from sites
that use known spammers for their DNS so they can't get throwaway
domains and drop them before the Internic kills them for non-payment.

At home I implement this fully and find it very satisfying. A lot of
spam gets dropped. I tried to do something similar at vex.net, my
ISP, but the testing I did suggested that customers just wouldn't
stand for it. There are a lot of broken sites without proper reverse
DNS and they just refuse to fix themselves. I suspect if we had to
verify addresses we would be hearing echoes up and down our password
file.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy(at){druid|vex}.net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 424 2871 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.