[At-Large] Fwd: [technical-issues] Banning .xyz email from my company's servers

Evan Leibovitch evan at telly.org
Thu Mar 17 12:26:12 UTC 2016


It's all in the balance, I guess.

On a very high-volume site, the scoring of each incoming mail -- which
requires examining content and evaluating it against what could be a
complex ruleset -- presents a potentially significant drain on resources.
If a reasonable judgment is made that a TLD is a source of no significant
non-spam, then it's far more efficient to just block on the TLD.

It's certainly not uncommon for people or organizations to say "if you want
to communicate with me you need to do so in a way that is acceptable to
me". The requirements could mean (in descending level of complexity) a
local set of rules, or not being on the spamhaus black list, or not using
an undesired TLD.

Olivier's issue of bounce messages might be appropriate ... if the
recipient of the bounce messages cared at all. I imagine most spamming
sites would just drop them.

Arguably that "drastic" action -- cutting off access from a whole TLD --
provides a market-based incentive for that TLD to clean up its act. If
enough of the world won't accept mail from a TLD, theoretically its sales
would drop and there would be a financial incentive to fix that.

In the absence of any regulatory enforcement of abuse complaints, this is
as effective an agent of change as one can hope for.

Universal Acceptance is ICANN's begging the world to live with the products
of its TLD expansion, no matter how awful they may be. But given ICANN's
lack of any real end-user protections (led by identifiable Board members
who believe that end-users are not legitimate stakeholders), this is really
the only tool available with which to fight back.

- Evan


On 17 March 2016 at 05:32, <bzs at theworld.com> wrote:

>
> [is this OT, how did this start?]
>
> I use spamassassin system-wide to increase the spam score of a message
> from certain TLDs to near the threshold where it's just rejected.
>
> So for example in local.cf I add a rule like:
>
> header DOTTOP_RULE              From =~ /.*\.top/i
> describe DOTTOP_RULE            BZS 20160226
> score DOTTOP_RULE               2.5
>
> which means just having a .TOP TLD in the From gives it a base score
> of 2.5, so it wouldn't take much more, tripping some other
> spamassassin rules, to just get it blocked entirely.
>
> But it means in theory a very non-spammy msg from that TLD might still
> get through.
>
> --
>         -Barry Shein
>
> Software Tool & Die    | bzs at TheWorld.com             |
> http://www.TheWorld.com
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-- 
Evan Leibovitch
Geneva, CH

Em: evan at telly dot org
Sk: evanleibovitch
Tw: el56
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