FairUCE - the Smart Email Proxy 333
Jestrzcap writes "This just posted on Freshmeat: FairUCE (which stands for 'Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email') is an SMTP proxy, running between multiple instances of Postfix, that verifies email by attempting to verify the sender through lookups (a user customized challenge/response). It claims to be able to 'stop a vast majority of spam' without the need for content filters, and 'virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements'."
At last - a technological solution to spam! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Italics!! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:At last - a technological solution to spam! (Score:3, Funny)
I agree
That said, I'm selling herbal viagra if anyone's interested.
Re:Naive at best (Score:1, Funny)
No, they could block 22 as well.
Here we go again (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Funny)
Re:forward and reverse (Score:3, Funny)
I have a generally very high success rate for reverse DNS lookups ... at least where reverse DNS is actually set up. But there is an occiasional ISP that has such poor service that DNS lookups often fail. And I've even seen ISPs that, for some reason, only have random selections of their IP space set up with reverse DNS (out of a block of 32 there might be 25 with reverse DNS and repeated queries show consistency). One fundamental problem is ISPs hiring the bottom of the barrel in tech talent, especially at the manager level.
Re:At last - a technological solution to spam! (Score:3, Funny)
Which reminds me -- your new shipment of grass clippings and barber hair is ready for delivery.
Yaz.
Re:At last - a technological solution to spam! (Score:1, Funny)
wait, sorry.
Thanks for the idea! Here's your perl script! (Score:1, Funny)
'type' => [ 'technical', 'legislative', 'market-based', 'vigilante' ],
'reason' => [
'Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses',
'Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected',
'No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money',
'It is defenseless against brute force attacks',
'It will stop spam for two weeks and then we\'ll be stuck with it',
'Users of email will not put up with it',
'Microsoft will not put up with it',
'The police will not put up with it',
'Requires too much cooperation from spammers',
'Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once',
'Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers',
'Spammers don\'t care about invalid addresses in their lists',
'Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else\'s career or business', ],
'fail' => [
'Laws expressly prohibiting it',
'Lack of centrally controlling authority for email',
'Open relays in foreign countries',
'Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses',
'Asshats',
'Jurisdictional problems',
'Unpopularity of weird new taxes',
'Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money',
'Huge existing software investment in SMTP',
'Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack',
'Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email',
'Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes',
'Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches',
'Extreme profitability of spam',
'Joe jobs and/or identity theft',
'Technically illiterate politicians',
'Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers',
'Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves',
'Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering', 'Outlook', ],
'objections' => [
'Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical',
'Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable',
'SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation',
'Blacklists suck', 'Whitelists suck',
'We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored',
'Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud',
'Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks',
'Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually',
'Sending email should be free',
'Why should we have to trust you and your servers?',
'Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses',
'Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem',
'Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome',
'I don\'t want the government reading my email',
'Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough', ],
'about' => [
'Sorry dude, but I don\'t think it would work.',
'This is a stupid idea, and you\'re a stupid person for suggesting it.',
'Nice try, assh0le! I\'m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!' ]);
srand(time);
sub getIndex { return rand( shift() - 1 ); }
$post = "Your post advocates a"
.$choice{'type' }[ getIndex($#{$choice{'type'}}) ]
." approach to fighting spam.\nYour idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.\n"
.$choice{'reason' }[ getIndex($#{$choice{'reason'}}) ]
."Specifically, your plan fails to account for "
.lcfirst $choice{'fail' }[ getIndex($#{$choice{'fail'}}) ]
."\nand moreover I have the following philosophical objection, \nmainly "
.lcfirst $choice{'objections' }[ getIndex($#{$choice{'objections' }}) ]
.$choice{'about' }[ getIndex($#{$choice{'about'}}) ]
."\n\nSincerely yours,\nSlashdot anonymous random perl bot\n\n";
$post =~ s/ *\. */.\n/g;
print $post;
I will stop the spam (Score:1, Funny)
Give me some time to whip up a psuedo anonymous system where all of your email is forwarded to my machine and I will read the subject line and the beginning of the message. From this, I will determine if it is spam or not. If I approve it, it goes to your inbox, otherwise it goes to your spam box. Headers from spam-marked messages will get automatically passed on to select spam-fighting associations. Whitelisted addresses will bypass me completely.
You may be trading off some privacy, but think of the benefits of a clean inbox. Don't worry... you can trust me with all of your email. And besides... it's not different than sending your email through an automated scanner like postini... any admin there can read your mail anyways. For that matter, your email can be read by any mail server administrator anywhere along the way to your inbox. In postfix, I could just add a line "always_bcc" and receive a copy of any email coming or going through my server. At least this way, you KNOW your mail is getting read... no questions about it.
If you need any more persuasion, try this: "C'mon! Just do it already! You know you like the idea!".
Re:(Can't You) Troll Like I Do (Score:3, Funny)
Something like:
I've got the hacktitude of a Redmond pro
I've got the legacy devices of a billion sold
I got My Rights Online back, but I don't seem to care
I got the compressed jay-pegs of sex with a mare!
TFP. HAND.
Re:Thanks for the idea! Here's your perl script! (Score:1, Funny)