Re: [suse-security] ezmlm warning
On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Carlos E. R. wrote:
To: SuSE Security List
From: Carlos E. R. Subject: Re: [suse-security] ezmlm warning -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
The Sunday 2006-04-02 at 20:45 +0100, suse@karsites.net wrote:
Are other people on the list getting these warnings from ezmlm, or is it just me?
Just you.
Or is someone spamming the list?
Yes... but that's not the issue, in this case. You compounded the problem, sort of speaking :-p
I'll explain, I think I can trail these things.
1) First, the list received a spam message - and we commented on it back then (search the list archive):
|> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 06:48:14 +0300 |> From: "PayPal Inc." <service at paypal.com> |> To: suse-securitya at suse.com |> Subject: [suse-security] SPAM: Notification of Limited Account Access
This is a known problem with ezmlm, the list server, it can subscribe unwanted addresses.
2) The next step was that the list server dutifully sent that message to you, because spam is not filtered out.
3) Then, you, or your server, rejected the email because you considered it spam - that is a thing that never should happen. You should store spam on another folder, but never bounce it back: the "from" address is usually faked, or may belong to somebody else that knows nothing about it. Worse, it can be the spammer, that then knows that your address is valid.
Thankyou for the explanation Carlos. I do not actually run a mail server on my machine, just in case my machine is off-line, which would mean I could miss some incoming mail. I collect my email from my ISP with fetchmail -v running as a cron job every hour. I use a utility called SpamShield provided by my ISP. (May be based on SpamAsassin.) They tell me that mail detected as SPAM that reaches the delete threshold just gets deleted from my email folder on their machine. It does not get returned to the sender. Do you think it was my ISP that bounced the email back to the list? Why we're on the subject of SPAM, is there a central database with an email address that I can forward any SPAM messages to, that are not being detected by SpamShield? So they can be identified as SPAM, and added to a central blocking list? Regards Keith
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suse@karsites.net