[Info-vax] Anything wrong with this anti-spam measure?

[Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply]

In article
<ef65eba6-a33b-4808-9ca8-031ceb639d43 at d5g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>, Neil
Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> writes: 

> Not sure about HP's stack, but on a system running TCPware there is a
> designated "post master" which receives all mail with no account. For
> years now this has been defined as NEIL. 

As in Neil Postman?  :-)

> At the beginning of this year
> I decided to do the following:
> 
> 1) Create a bogus account name that no one could ever guess
> 2) Install DELIVER from the OpenVMS freeware disc
> 4) In the bogus account, I created a file named MAIL.DELIVERY which
> contains rules to ignore (throw away) the biggest SPAM sources, SPAM
> destinations, or SPAM subjects. All others are transferred to account
> NEIL. With about 30 lines I throw away more than 90% of the SPAM
> hitting my system

I haven't checked into DELIVER.  However, with the spamhaus.org RBL and 
the symbiont-checks-deliverability set to FALSE, I probably get rid of 
well over 90%.  As for the rest, both the annoyance and the backscatter 
stuff are reasons to attack the problem.

Note that with symbiont-checks-deliverability set to FALSE in your
SMTP.CONFIG, you can get rid of all stuff to non-existent accounts
before it gets as far as VMS MAIL.  I think the connection is dropped as
soon as the recipient is mentioned.  (And with a newer version of TCPIP,
this works as well for usernames which are not syntactically valid VMS
usernames .) 

The catch-all account is a nice idea, and would prevent backscatter
spam; it would be nice to have it in HP TCPIP.