Thanks to the following for their responses:
Becki Kain
Don Becker
Gary Gladney
Peter Flack
H. Blakely Williford
Richard Eisenman
Jim Belonis
Robert Honore
Steve VanDevender
Robert L. McMillin
Most suggested to use sendmail 8.8.6 or 8.8.7, which can allow you to
filter out addresses that you don't want to receive mail from. Also,
they can be linked with TCP wrapper 7.6, for even more effective
blocking. sendmail can be gotten from
http://www.sendmail.org, and TCP
wrapper 7.6 is available on the Alpha Freeware CD, or from
ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/tcp_wrappers_7.6.tar.gz. Another tool
to try is procmail.
Something called spamguard can configure your mailer to only accept
connections from known addresses. This may be a little restrictive.
It is available from:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/wj/wje/release
Another was considering unsubscribing from the mailing list, but this
will only prevent new spammers from getting your address. If your are
receiving spam now, someone already has your address, and unsubscribing
will not prevent these guys from hitting you again, unless you change
your account.
One other suggestion was to put a bogus string like NOSPAM in the middle
of your return address, so at least the automatic address harvesters
will not be able to get a fix on you.
However, someone else pointed out that the more sophisticated spammers
are using custom programs to attach directly to the smtp port on target
machines, and then sending a message using legitimate addresses (fakes).
These are very hard to block, and appears to a weakness in the smtp
design.
I've also gotten a couple of WEB pages that discuss how to deal with
spamming:
http://info-sys.home.vix.com/spam/
http://spam.abuse.net
thanks again to all for their responses
eyc
Received on Thu Sep 11 1997 - 17:18:51 NZST