[Mimedefang] Off topic: Ethics of deleteing spam

[F.M. Taylor]

It is an interesting question and problem.  I will tell you what I/we do and you 
can make the call.

I handle all the mail incoming for the university (recently an "interesting" 
problem ;)) By handle all the incoming mail, what I mean is I scanned our entire 
class b for machines that had port 25 open AND had a dns entry.  For each one of 
these machine I commanded that an MX entry be put into the DNS server pointing 
to our mail-filtering cluster.  Lots o mail.  I have mimedefand set to strip all 
of the attachments listed in the "example" filter.  This caused me a little pain 
for awhile, but people eventually got used to it.  After this I started tagging 
mail with SA by putting the "message is spam" in the header for anything that 
hit over 5 points.  This worked for me, and a few of my more cluefull users, but 
most could not filter based on this (or any other "special") header, as most of 
them are using novell groupwoze.  So, I started tagging anything over a 5 in the 
  subject with [SPAM], users accepted this and learned to filter, or just got 
used to seeing the tag.  I then semi-secretly (I informed people who matter but 
don't understand me when I speak) started REJECTING anything that scores over a 
15.  This may seem a little low, but it doesn't seem to be causing any problems. 
  I am still watching this to see if I can drop it even lower ;)

Yes, some people do see me as the BOFH, and I am proud of it.  Long live the 
Draconian empire, as long as I run it ;)


Alan Madill wrote:
> We are losing customers to our competitors because of spam.  The 
> customer claims that they know someone who uses ISP xyz and 
> they get very little spam.  They have to be filtering it.

[snip]

> 
> We would like to just delete it or bounce it but we are worried about 
> the ethical and legal issues of doing so.
> 
> What is everyone else doing?
> 
> -
> Alan Madill - Hwy16 Internet
> Technical Services
> 250 567-4200
> 
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