On 2015-06-29 08:37, Ben wrote:
I can't speak about the specifics of this particular change, but
anything that makes it harder to trivially forward a message,
Whilst I obviously can't argue with you in the context of making it easy to
report spam, there are a couple of things to point out.
First, Jo said "have removed all functionality", that is technically and
factually incorrect, which is why I posted the message I did. Other methods
remain available and all that needs to be done is for Jo to update the
instructions to users.
Second, I'm becoming less and less of a buyer on the whole "report it to the
ISP" malarky. Its starting to become a bit of a 1990's way of doing it. I
increasingly find myself wondering whether ISPs actually bother to read abuse
mails or whether they get filtered straight to /dev/null.
Case in point on number two, for some months now I have been receving Spam
originating from a Verizon customer. The Verizon customer appears to be some
sort of marketing company that has a range on the Verizon network.
Every...single...time... I report the spam, full headers & all. Have they done
anything about it ? No. Has the volume of spam reduced ? No.
I ended up blocking that IP in a custom RBL that I feed into SpamAssassin.
Sure, I guess for tweaking your internal SpamAssassin implementation, headers
could be useful. But for external reporting, I think they've had their day.
It's an excellent tool for gathering active addresses. Then the spammer simply
has to craft an email that makes it through the filters, likely sent from a
completely different source.
Reporting to the ISPs is, except in unusual circumstances, seems to be an
exceptionally counter-productive trick.
That said, it might pay to catch the mails in the MTA and drop them there. Then
the naifs at the keyboard think they'd done something useful and you've actually
made it useful by leaving that address a black hole. Eventually the addresses
will fall from the live addresses lists and fall to the secondary "we're gonna
keep trying forever" lists.
{^_^}
