Re: OT: spammers [was offending sig + headers]
On Fri, May 18, 2007 at 12:12:29PM -0600, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday, May 18 at 10:47 AM, quoth Darrin Chandler:
> > Spammers will not adapt to greylisting until they absolutely must.
>
> Mmmm, not true. I already get spam from all manner of people whom I
> did business with once and now can't convince not to send me email
<SNIP>
> Plus, there's always open-relays and (my personal favorite) forwarding
<SNIP>
> The only spammers that greylisting blocks are the ones that use
> botnets. Which, don't get me wrong, is a lot! But they aren't the
> entire class of spammers.
Yes, there are very many methods in use. For my point, you can divide
these into two groups: normal MTAs, and special super-fast mass mailers.
There are a bazillion spammers, but the vast majority of spam comes from
a few major players (and their hired script kids). In the same way,
there are a bazillion machines sending spam, but the vast majority come
from the fast mass mailers.
Glitching up the fast mailers does good.
> But again, the economics argument seems to me to be a specious one.
> Spammers have essentially infinite resources: a giant botnet costs
Their resources are vast, but not infinite. If they were infinite, they
would not have value. Yet they seem to protect their botnets to some
degree. There is *some* cost involved, however low. Raising that cost,
even a tiny bit, is a step in the right direction. Spam only pays
because the cost is so ridiculously low.
> I understand and appreciate your argument, but I just don't believe
> spammers are terribly worried about greylisting.
I don't think so either. I greylist because it works well, and it
currently wastes spammers' time and resources a tiny bit more than not
greylisting.
--
Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG
dwchandler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation