[CentOS] SPAM on the List

[Always Learning]

On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 15:45 +0900, 夜神 岩男 wrote:

> On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 04:04 +0100, Always Learning wrote:

> > It seems spammers have successfully hacked Rupert Murdock's London Times
> > newspaper and copied hundreds of thousands of email addresses or has a
> > member of staff sold the email addresses to spammers to make some money?

> Though it is certainly possible that a breach of some sort is
> responsible for your spam, sniffing for email headers on high activity
> parts of a network would be sufficient to collect a large number of
> active email addresses to try (sniffing at Tor gateways could provide
> interesting results, come to think of it). Another big winner for
> mailbox collection is to not crack the information provider's site, but
> to instead crack the email service provider and obtain a list of all
> active accounts on that server (which would likely span multiple
> domains).

In the example I mentioned, it was a specially created single purpose
email SMTP address (no POP etc.) used just once about 5? months ago. It
is easy for me to block it as the mail server (MTA Mail Transfer Agent)
which I have done.

> Getting a hold of email accounts can happen any number of ways, most of
> them uncontrollable by the account holder. Its a mailbox -- an open
> destination for the world to send you stuff. You can't be too surprised
> when the world does in fact send you stuff.

We are no so liberal with mailboxes. Some can be accessed only by prior
approved senders. Others, because they are single purpose email
addresses, can be permanently blocked after the first unwanted email.
Some email addresses are created with sub-domains that can be dropped at
the first abuse then replaced by new sub-domains.

> The difference between deposit/fetch and send/receive is profound. This
> is part of why I'm surprised that newsreaders and forums have fallen
> from favor amongst technical discussion groups. The "Logging into forums
> is a PITA" or "setting up another client is a PITA" arguments obviously
> won the debate -- though I think spam is a lot deeper into PITA
> territory than either at the present time.

The problems with forums are, in my personal opinion:-

(1) Spyware : logging every access with Google the USA's international
spying operation.

(2) Advertisements

(3) tiny text difficult to read

(4) Pop-up windows

(5) Layout not conducive to easy and quick reading.

(6) Having to visit a web site and then log-on if one wants to respond.

Conversely:-

Email Lists are quick, easy, immediate (certainly for my set-up),
require no extra effort.  Should the address get spammed, then its one
quick and simple change:-

(a) replacement DNS sub-domain

(b) update Mailman

(c) change email address in email client.



-- 
With best regards,

Paul.
England,
EU.