On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 03:30:28AM +0000, Vernon Schryver wrote: > > From: Gary Mills > > > don't expect to be bulk mail. I realize that I could whitelist > > checksums of empty message to alleviate that problem, but unless this > > process is automated, I'd have to be doing it regularly. We also > > advise people to add some text to empty messages, but that seems like > > a peculiar solution. Is there anything else I can do other than > > disabling the Fuz2 checksum? > > I disagree with several assumptions there. > One is that only the FUZ2 checksum catches what might be called empty > messages. > Another is that most such empty messages are wanted email instead > of viruses, worms, phishing, trojan horses, and other kinds of spam.
You are correct here. I was only looking at messages that people had whitelisted; they must have wanted them. I don't know how many spam messages they had not wanted and had not whitelisted. This is part of the problem, of course. I still don't have a good prediction if what will happen if I disable the Fuz2 checksum. > Then there is the notion that filtering spam can be free in time, > effort, and money. Users may assume that. I don't. > If using the cron script /var/dcc/libexec/fetch-testmsg-whitelist in > the DCC source to maintain a current copy of the iecc.com list of > checksums of empty and test messages and contributing new checksums to > John's list is too much trouble or if John's list is not suitable, > then it sounds best to disable DCC checking for some or all of your users. I have been using that whitelist file but downloading it manually. My copy is now a year old. Oh look, the new copy I just downloaded is the same except for white space! It's true that I haven't been contributing to it, but obviously nobody else has been doing that either. That highlights another part of the problem. Checksums of empty messages change regularly because e-mail senders change their MIME and HTML goo, along with their advertizing footers. I don't have a way to detect empty messages. Users can only whitelist them by sender; they don't realize that they are empty. > P.S. I think I've made some useful changes to that cron script since I > released the years old version of the DCC software that you are using. Thanks for maintaining stable interfaces. A software upgrade is in my plans. So is retirement. Which will win? -- -Gary Mills- -Unix Group- -Computer and Network Services- _______________________________________________ DCC mailing list [email protected] http://www.rhyolite.com/mailman/listinfo/dcc
