On Mon, Dec 29, 2003, David Uzzell wrote: > I have seen in the past a Bot that would take all the incomming mail and > check it againts Blocklist, and whitelist, if it was not listed it would > reply to the email automaticly requesting Confirmation that the Email > Sender is a real person to which they would reply and would be auto > added to the whitelist and if they did not reply in 23-48-72 hours(what > ever was set) they would be added to the blocklist! > > Can someone point me in the direction of something that will do this for > qmail please?
According to the qmail Anti-Spam HOWTO, Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TDMA) is the best solution of this kind: http://tmda.sourceforge.net/ [Source: http://www.chrishardie.com/tech/qmail/qmail-antispam.html#user_whitelist] As a mailing list admin, I'd like to suggest the following tests for the tool you choose: - Make sure it send the challenge to the Return-Path address, not the From address. The reason for this is that if your users subscribe to a mailing list like techtalk and the bot responds to the From address, then *every single poster* gets a "please add yourself to my whitelist!" mail. I don't want to have to add myself to a whole bunch of whitelists every time I post to techtalk :) If it responds to the Return-Path, at least only the mailing list admins will see it. - Alert your users to the fact that they will need to be careful about whitelisting automated mails. For example, if they join any service that requires email confirmation (like slashdot.org, kuro5hin.org, livejournal.com... there are hundreds) and the bot sends a challenge, then it's pretty unlikely that the admins of the site will bother whitelisting their address (on two principles: 1. "you explicitly asked for this mail, so whitelist me yourself" and 2. "if I have to do this for each of our million users I will go nuts") Even linuxchix now has a "if you subscribe to our lists, whitelist them yourself" policy. I hope the links I provided help. -Mary -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
