Message-ID: <mailto:950627.190621.EDT.JIM@american.edu> Date: Tue, 27 Jun 1995 19:06:21 EDT From: Jim McIntosh <mailto:JIM@AMERICAN.EDU> Subject: Re: Save Your Computer! To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L In-Reply-To: <mailto:199506271929.OAA53435@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
On Tue, 27 Jun 95 13:28 CST Cliff Missen, M.A. said:
>Please note that this individual spammed several lists with this
>commercial message from your site.
For the last few years The American University has been providing a gateway service between about 350 electronic mailing lists and usenet newsgroups (most in the bit.* hierarchy). We have donated the resources need to perform this service as a contribution to the networking community.
The gateway passes all posts from the newsgroup to the mailing list and from the mailing list to the newsgroup. This allows people to read from and post to mailing lists using a "news reader" instead of having the mail arrive intermixed with their incoming personal e-mail. It also allows those who do not have access to news to read from and post to a newsgroup in which they have an interest. The gateway passes all posts without examining their contents. In all cases the gateways were established at the request of or with the permission of the list owners.
>From time to time someone has posted an advertisement to a large number
of newsgroups -- including those for which we provide this gateway
service. These posts are then sent to the mailing list associated with
the newsgroup. Also from time to time someone has posted an advertisement
to a large number of mailing lists, and the gateway again has done its
job and posted these messages to the newsgroups associated with these
mailing lists. These "spam" messages almost always result in hundreds of
complaints to the postmaster account at our site. Even worse, our mail
software appends our domain name to badly constructed e-mail addresses --
making it look like the person who posted the "spam" message is one of
our users -- or the listserv detects the incorrect e-mail address and
instead uses the gateway's address -- making it look like the gateway
originated the post.
The amount of time dealing with the peripheral issues related to the gateways has simply gotten out of hand. We have not minded providing the machine resources for the gateway service -- most of the posts were coming to our Listserv and/or news server anyway -- and the time needed to set up the gateways has been minimal. However I cannot afford to spend vast amounts of time dealing with complaints every time a "spam" occurs -- on top of the fact that for providing a service to the networking community we appear to be a site which is causing trouble for the network.
Frankly, there seems to be no good way to provide a transparent gateway service between mailing lists and newsgroups in such a way as to prevent spams. It doesn't matter if the newsgroup is moderated or the mailing list is protected (eg, set Send=Private). The spammers put in Approved tags in their posts so they are accepted in moderated newsgroups, and since the gateway is both subscribed to the list and refered to in the post's headers the post is accepted for protected mailing lists.
We are at this point considering our options. We are looking into moving the gateways to a unix machine and both suppressing the appending of our domain name to incorrect addresses, as well as pointing back to the original poster or the list in the Return-Path field. Our only other alternative will be to stop providing the gateway service. Lists which cannot find an alternative gateway site would then have their associated newsgroups rmgroup'ed. We recognize this may effectively close down the bit.* hierarchy so we would prefer to get the first solution -- that of masking the gateway's address -- working.
Jim McIntosh (mailto:jim@american.edu) The American University Washington DC 20016-8019 USA