You wrote.... Uh, no. I own an ISP/Webhosting/Colocation firm. We have our own datacenter with rows & rows of racks full of customer servers as well as our own servers for our hosting/access service. We do not host our servers with another company. I have no clue why you get the idea that some company called dreamhost is hosting the classiccmp list. However, you can bet that I am going to investigate how/why it appears that way ;) The classiccmp list is hosted by me gratis on a server that I put in my own datacenter. I figure if I have the datacenter, it costs me nothing to take a server and allocate it to the classiccmp cause for free. The membership of the list at large occasionally pony's up donations to cover hardware upgrades, etc. All my time maintaining the server is gratis. In addition to hosting the list at no charge, I also have a standing offer that I will host any non-commercial classic computer related website totally free of charge. I also host the primary bitsavers.org website as well as scads of other classic computer sites. I do not own or control those other sites, I just provide the hosting for them on my servers (and administer the server itself). There is no relationship, I've never heard of them, at least in relation to me. The classiccmp list is certainly not hosted on any servers and/or service that they provide. Uh, I can into the datacenter and connect a console to the classiccmp server, log in as root, and hack up mailman any way I want :) No need to call anyone ;) Yes, it is possible. But due to the way these particular emails are crafted, no amount of custom/special rules will help. See my description of how they are doing it. I have thousands of domains I host, and I'm sure those clients would get a bit miffed if I said "no more graphic attachments". I think I'd lose many customers in a day ;) Actually... most of them would bolt because they INSIST on all their emails having graphic business cards/signatures at the bottom. *sigh*. Maybe spamassassin will find a way to progress in the tit-for-tat war with spammers. Jay

You wrote.... Custom built 1U rackmount server actually (classiccmp, not the spamassassin server). I am not ready to tackle this within the next 30 or 60 days, but before too long it is going to be time to upgrade the disc drives on the classiccmp server. First, the hardware raid controller has reported a few bumps here and there writing to both drives. When that starts happening more and more frequently it's generally time to replace them before you are running on just one drive. But that's not the main reason. The main reason is that the drives will be full in the near future. Bitsavers has grown a lot, but that certainly isn't the only one (and I don't mean to say it's the biggest 'offender' either). I've put more and more classic computer related sites on it for people and all of them have grown over time. In addition, the web developer is back at work on the classiccmp development website, so in the future the classiccmp website itself will need more storage. Right now the classiccmp server has two 160gb PATA drives, mirrored with a 3ware/Escalade raid-1 card. Since I really despise doing a major reload from scratch frequently on the classiccmp server, I'd just as soon get as large of drives as possible without it being stupidly expensive. I was thinking of getting two PATA drives that are perhaps around the 400gb area. That would give all the classiccmp sites (and bitsavers) plenty of room to grow as we'd be going from 160gb usable to 400gb usable. I have to stick with PATA, or we'd need a different raid controller that fits the small single PCI slot, or a different mainboard, and then a cascade of upgrades become necessary... so ... PATA :) At the same time the drives are replaced I will see about replacing fans & such too... have to watch out for 1U cases... Jay

Jay: A friend of mine signed-up with ClassicCmp about three weeks ago but hasn't seen any traffic. I don't know what email address he would have used but his name is Grant Stockly. Is there a way to see if his subscription to Talk was activated? Thanks. Rich Rich Cini Collector of classic computers Lead engineer, Altair32 Emulator Web site: http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/ Web site: http://www.altair32.com/ /***************************************************/

"Jay West" wrote: not sure. I'll tell you what you probably already know. Spam has been morphing lately on a couple of fronts. People who don't run their own SMTP servers have probably only noticed one of these fronts - the move to pictures embedded in mime encoded email. No Bayes classifier can deal with that (that I know of). Another front is the rise of spambots. I've seen a huge increase in "SMTP hangups", where a connection occurs and then is dropped. It's spambots fishing. Also, tons of email sent to non-existent users at valid domains. These cause double bouncing and clog up email servers. I've seen hundreds of them running all over (what appear to be) cable modem nets in the UK. And other places as well (no slight ment to those across the pond - just one of many examples). There must a lot of infected pc's running windows out there. I've taken to rejecting email at the SMTP level by checking the recipient - using a qmail variant called magic-smtpd. It's eliminated the double-bounces caused by email sent from non-existent users to non-existent users. But, the checking requires you to keep a list of valid email recipients. This is probably not practical for many domains but it might work for a list/domain where you know the list of valid recipients up front. Just a thought. The sad thing is that email is quickly becoming less effective than fax and the phone. A high percentage of email is filtered or lost. very frustrating. -brad

That's kind of what I've been doing with procmail. Lately I have said screw it and, in addition to DNSBLs, added sendmail rules to drop connections and some other tricks. I think Bayesian filtering is going to go the way of all other filtration because, as someone else already pointed out, spammers are including extracts of "normal" though unrelated text to defeat such analyses. I think the future will unfortunately be IP and network-based blocklists, and while the cure can be worse than the disease (increased possibility of false positives), the spamming community has proven that while they lack in ethics, they do not lack in innovation. The only cure for that is out-and-out ostracism of the networks that tolerate such behaviour. I have also gotten quite frustrated with various list echoes (not this one) that expose real E-mail addresses to the web. Since they have said they won't fix it, I'll name the worst offender I've dealt with, and that's the NetBSD lists. For that reason I have kept my postings to it to a minimum. Their mail admin basically said, "well, we thought it over briefly but we really don't care," and while I am a regular NetBSD user, that kind of attitude probably explains why the project is second-fiddle to the other BSDs, let alone Linux. Anyway, rant off, sorry. -- --------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "I don't think so," said Descartes, and he vanished. -----------------------