Article 79064 of comp.mail.misc: Path: freenet-news.carleton.ca!cunews!nott!torn!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!malgudi.oar.net!hyperion.wright.edu!alpha.wright.edu!pedwards From: pedwards@cs.wright.TOAST.edu (Phil Edwards) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Earthlink solutions (Re: junk email) Date: 10 Jul 1997 18:56:06 GMT Organization: $home Lines: 49 Message-ID: <5q3b86$opc$1@alpha.wright.edu> References: <33C52450.2768@berlin.snafu.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: gamma.cs.wright.edu X-Why-No-Archive: well, do /you/ think it's worth the diskspace? X-Ahem: Eat the .TOAST in my address if you plan on replying... Horst Wassenberg wrote: + I recently get a lot of junk email from hosts like + + earthlink.com or bulkemail222.com + + but I can't sent texts back. My questions: Those sites -- and earthlink.{com,net} in particular -- exist solely for bulk unsolicited junk mail. Their mail servers are setup specifically so that sending mail /to/ those sites is nearly impossible. Many aliased domains hide behind earthlink.net and use it as a mail relay. + is there a newsgroup concerned with that annoying + problem or does anybody know how to send mail back? ==> If you only have minimal help from your support staff, you can at least install a mail filter like procmail; anything with "earthlink.net" in the Received: header is definitely spammed and can be trashed. ==> If you have a lot of support from your staff, then you can either: 1) install procmail as a global filter[*], and solve all the users' headaches at once, or 2) assuming you're running sendmail, use some of the anti-spam provisions in sendmail 8.8. This solution is even better, because the filtering happens as the spam is (trying) to be delivered, rather than several seconds after the fact (when return mail is probably not possible). ==> If you have a /whole/ lot of support from your staff, or you /are/ the staff, consider adding a filter line or two to your routers. Disallow /any/ connections on /any/ port from /any/ address within the earthlink.net domains (use nslookup and whois to get those numbers). Mail won't even reach your machines from the spammers then. [*] An alternative that is less invasive but requires intelligence on the part of your users is to install procmail as the local delivery agent; users then can filter their own mail automatically without needing to install anything themselves, and you can recommend certain filters to them (such as the earthlink one). Luck++; /dev/phil Incoming mail has reached unacceptable levels of spam/day; my address has been munged as a result. Remove the TOAST. (duh) and mail away!