[HCoop-Discuss] Spam

[Ryan M]

Hello,

Nathan Kennedy wrote:
> I don't know how many false positives you get, but you lost my
> discussion of a potential hard drive vendor because my email included a
> URL blacklisted for unknown reasons by one of the URLBL contributor, as
> far as I can tell, for no good reason.  Spam is not a solved problem, so
> let's use common sense and obfuscate email addresses in our archives, as
> I thought we were already, although admittedly rob at hcoop.net is not the
> hardest address in the world to guess--oops, I just included it in the
> message body, so he's sure to get even more spam.
>
>   
That was the first false positive I ever got.  That was pure, funky luck 
that that URL was
included.  Also, any past email that did not have a proper name was 
noted by SA as being
more likely spam (+1).  But that shouldn't be an issue any more :-)

In any case,

> Anyway, all that to say that it's important to use whitelists and to be
> suspicious of blacklists if you don't want to lose important emails.
> My own level of spam has risen from one or two a week to hundreds a day
> in the past few months.  It is a real problem.
>
>   
Whitelists are indispensable. Also, not pointing "spam" to /dev/null is 
a good idea.  But
I only ever whitelist false positives.  So I did this for your false 
positive:
spamassassin --add-addr-to-whitelist='*@hcoop.net'

Alternatively, manually do it by adding an entry into 
~/.spamassassin/user_prefs
whitelist_from *@hcoop.net

Although, the former should generate the ~/.spamassassin/ tree 
automagically.

In the end, Internet Email addresses are in the public realm.  We can do 
certain things to pretend they're private, but that
is quite the struggle.  In this case, defeatism is OK in my book.

> -ntk
>   
Ryan