tlug: Spam filters

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Don't use NAGS.  Unless you want to be part of the problem.

It, at least in the configuration I just encountered, produces an
autoresponse which looks just like spam.  Right down to the anonymity
of the sender (I happen to believe sender's real name was used in the
RFC-822 comment field, but I had to be pretty tricky to confirm it),
use of the triggering message's "From:" address as part of the
"From:" address with no "Sender:"[1], misrepresentation of the host's
name in the SMTP conversation, and inclusion of legalistic scare talk
which is irrelevant because _all_ systems on the path from my machine
to the NAGS host are in Japan.  The only thing it didn't do was steal
mail service from a large provider.

It is pretty stupid, too.  It does not know the difference between
real headers and headers quoted in the body of the message (and
encapsulated in a MIME multi-part part, to boot).

And to add injury to insult, it claims to have sent mail to my
postmaster.  This is likely to get said postmaster very pissed off if
they do not run a large public-access domain with a history of
spamming.  It is a _very_ bad idea to send unsolicited mail to third
parties automatically.  Ever heard of "spam"?

This software is too buggy by design to be easily fixable.

IMHO.

Steve

Footnotes: 
[1]  This is just gratuitously stupid; if there's a real address
there, it's fairly unlikely that the message was spam in the first
place.

-- 
This was a public service message.

Next TLUG meeting is Saturday Dec. 13, 1997  (possibly Nov. 13?)
---------------------------------------------------------------
a word from the sponsor:
TWICS - Japan's First Public-Access Internet System
www.twics.com  info@example.com  Tel:03-3351-5977  Fax:03-3353-6096