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Grex > Oldcoop > #376: The problems with Grex, e-mail and spam | |
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| 25 new of 480 responses total. |
naftee
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response 416 of 480:
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Jan 4 07:31 UTC 2007 |
rick moot
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cross
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response 417 of 480:
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Feb 27 01:47 UTC 2007 |
So it occurs to me that there's something we can do about spam: make email
opt-in and outsource spam filtering for those users who must use grex for
email. They can handle the cost of, e.g., using messagelabs.com's service.
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keesan
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response 418 of 480:
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Feb 27 02:05 UTC 2007 |
People who 'must' use grex for email are dialin users who don't have money.
Why should they be required to pay for spam filtering when grex has the
capability to do it?
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cross
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response 419 of 480:
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Feb 27 02:50 UTC 2007 |
Because grex doesn't have the capability to do it. If they can't afford it,
they should figure out how to use POP3 to talk to gmail or yahoo. You know,
you can use email hosted somewhere else without using a web browser.
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cmcgee
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response 420 of 480:
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Feb 27 03:19 UTC 2007 |
If they don't have the money, then they are more likely to want to spend the
time fixing a spam filter. It is not that it can't be done on Grex, it is
that staff has higher priorities.
Sindi, if they cannot afford the for-pay service, then you can show them how
to do it for free.
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keesan
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response 421 of 480:
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Feb 27 03:42 UTC 2007 |
Yes, that is what I want to offer via the motd. People who can figure out
how to use POP3 to talk to gmail probably can afford an ISP.
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cross
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response 422 of 480:
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Feb 27 04:28 UTC 2007 |
This post is sort of `thinking out loud,' not a plan of action. I'm looking
for comments here, not buy-in. So comment away.
Yesterday, I drove to Maryland and back with Tom Limoncelli, author of The
Practice of System and Network Administartion (if you're in that business
and haven't read that book, you have a problem. If you read it and didn't
get something out of it, then you need to give it to all the people that
report to you and get them to read it). He told me about the
messagelabs.com solution, and it sounded really good.
I'm coming to think that it's just not worth it for grex to even try and run
spamassassin or any of the rest of it. The cost of messagelabs isn't very
much; about $50 per person per year. Also, since they're an anti-spam
company, it's well known that their servers don't *send out* spam. We could
configure grex to route *outbound* mail for verified members through them
and then we wouldn't run into that annoying situation where mail from grex
users gets blocked because grex is known for sending out spam.
Thus, a good overall solution for email is the following: slash the cost of
a grex membership in half, to $3/month or $30/year. Users who want email
have to become members and also agree to have their mail routed through
messagelabs.com, which does all the spam and virus filtering for us, and the
users agree to cover the cost of their email being filtered, for a total
cost of $30 + ~$50 = ~$80/year. Grex's email configuration and firewall
rules are modified so that connections to the mail server from outside grex
are only allowed from messageslabs.com's servers. We modify our DNS data to
point our MX records to messagelabs and let them take care of the spam
problem for us.
This provides an economic disincentive for users to continue to use email at
grex, but not a terrible one: cost is only $20/year more than being a member
now. It also basically eliminates the staff involvement in email: our email
system can go back to being stupid and simple. Email is such a hard problem
to solve from a staff perspective that I think we just have to start taking
the position that users have to share in the cost. I'm sorry if it's a
bummer, but there it is. This organization is just not in the position to
support email as a first-class application anymore: it's just too hard. We
need to abandon or outsource.
For other users, we might be able to set something up where certain
usernames are passed through to grex without filtration, and on grex's end
we forward them to another provider of their choice (e.g., hotmail, yahoo,
gmail, whatever). Then they can configure, e.g., pine or mutt to connect
to those remote servers on the POP3 and SMTP ports so that they can use grex
to read interact with their yahoo or gmail accounts. We could open ports
in our firewall rules allowing access to a certain limited set of ports at
the major mail providers (all of which require authentication, so sending
spam through grex would still not be possible; or, if they did do it, they'd
get their accounts at the Yahoo or GMail side closed almost immediately).
But the point is, we need to face the reality that grex just does not have
the bandwidth in terms of staff time and availability to run its own mail
anymore...
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maus
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response 423 of 480:
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Feb 27 04:32 UTC 2007 |
resp:421 That is a rather absurd statement. How do you come to equate
having available capital with having technical expertise? In most
cases, the two are disjoint, hence the existence of finance.
Keesan, if you have access to the Internet, even a slow 9600 bps dial-in
SLIP access, you can get mail via pop-mail from a provider such as Y! or
Google.
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keesan
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response 424 of 480:
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Feb 27 05:25 UTC 2007 |
I do not want to use pop mail. I can use popmail with my ISP if I want.
I like using pine or mutt at a shell account. I am happy with the spam filter
that I have here and am only trying to make it easier for other people to use
something similar. If all the mail accounts which are no longer being used
were closed, spamassassin could be run on all incoming mail to the accounts
still in use, but in the meantime I just want to help people set up individual
filters. They can tell me if they want spam dumped or saved to a spam folder,
and get help making a whitelist.
Someone mentioned IMAP - would it be possible to ssh to grex and use IMAP to
read mail at some other site? Viewing only the subject lines and deciding
what to actually read?
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cross
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response 425 of 480:
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Feb 27 13:17 UTC 2007 |
Regarding #424; You can use POP and still use pine or mutt from the grex
shell. In that case, pine or mutt or whatever just gets the mail via POP
from a remote mail server and you read it as you normally would;
conceptually, this is the same as reading it from /var/mail.
It amazes me that you ask about SSH'ing to grex and using IMAP, but are
opposed to POP. Conceptually, for this purpose, the two are exactly the
same.
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cmcgee
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response 426 of 480:
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Feb 27 14:08 UTC 2007 |
My first reaction to Dan's proposal is that it makes a big change in Grex's
mission and philosophy.
We have, in the past, agreed as a community, to keep the difference between
being a paying participant and a non-paying participant as minimal as
possible. Membership DOES NOT buy privileges.
Just about everyone, except Sindi, probably makes liberal use of the many free
email systems that are far more reliable than Grex. It is Sindi's philisophy
that keeps her from helping her friends find free, reliable email.
Access to much older equipment, for almost free (such as one can find at
Kiwanis here in Ann Arbor) still allows one to use Yahoo!, Gmail, etc, etc.
[philosophy, back up a few lines]
There IS a solution to spam on Grex for those who want to use it. For free.
I see no reason to enter into a longterm contract with someone else, increase
membership fees, and give up on Grex email.
I agree the tool is seriously bent. But it still works, and there are better,
free tools out there for those who are unhappy with what we choose to provide.
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cross
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response 427 of 480:
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Feb 27 15:56 UTC 2007 |
Thanks, Colleen, for your thoughts. As I said, this is just thinking out
loud. However, I think you misinterpreted at something in my proposal: it's
not using membership for buying privileges, but rather covering costs and
doing reasonable verification on those who can send/receive email here.
Yes, it's a bit of a philosophical departure from what we have done in the
past, but we need to take into account the fact that the economics of email
and, indeed, just about everything computer related, have changed
dramatically since grex was founded. As we move forward to a solution to
the email problem, we can't forget that; our old assumptions about how mail
fundamentally works have broken down and we need to adjust accordingly.
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keesan
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response 428 of 480:
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Feb 27 19:56 UTC 2007 |
I mentioned IMAP because fastmail.fm (with 10MB mail storage but limited
bandwidth in its free accounts) offers free IMAP, but paid POP. Their free
spam filter is pretty bad though. Since Jan 24 I am getting increasing
amounts of junk, up to 2 per day. My procmail/spamassassin filter here does
a far better job. Can you download gmail mail to grex, for free? Using the
webmail interface is not practical on older hardware and slower connections.
Thanks for the motd. So far no takers.
Fastmail explained how to use vi to edit Pine to work with their IMAP.
I do have more reliable mail, at SDF. 100MB mailbox. But no spamassassin.
So I don't post my address there online. I got NO spam here today.
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kingjon
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response 429 of 480:
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Feb 27 20:48 UTC 2007 |
#428: Yes, you can download Gmail mail via POP for free. If a message is marked
as "read" via POP it won't show up on POP again, due I presume to Gmail's
"tags" system (which replaces folders), so if you do so, make sure to locally
save a copy of any mail you want to keep. (Which is, as I understand it, the
original point of POP, the "Post Office Protocol" -- that you download mail and
it's deleted on the original server.)
For that matter, Gmail is -- minimally -- accessible via lynx. It's what they
call their "bare HTML" view, and I'm not sure you can use all the standard
features, but it works for reading, tagging (which replaces filing into folders
-- read their FAQ for the details), and archiving. It does *not* work in links,
since it detects that browser's minimal Javascript, tries to use that, and
fails miserably.
In my experience (admittedly my only experience with POP is with Gmail), IMAP
is better than POP (A pity Gmail doesn't offer IMAP), but direct access as on
Grex surpasses either. (When I run into my Calvin mail quota, I ssh into the
web server, where mail folders are stored, and sftp them in a tarball off,
rather than go through the web interface.)
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cross
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response 430 of 480:
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Feb 27 21:06 UTC 2007 |
Regarding #428; As Jonathan said, yes, you can do POP with gmail for free,
and you have a 2GB (yes, *giga*byte) quota for mail. I wouldn't say that it's
`not practical on older hardware and slower connections' to use the web
interface, though. Opera running on most of the boat anchors you give out
would probably do a reasonable job.
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keesan
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response 431 of 480:
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Feb 27 22:34 UTC 2007 |
It took 2 minutes to download the gmail starting page with opera. Their pages
are too large. And webmail is inherently slow and GUI-ish. Can one retrieve
mail from another site with IMAP at grex? With POP? I am not ever going to
use popmail via modem to download to my own computer. I don't read most of
what is sent me (freecycle mail).
I might some day experiment with IMAP/pine and fastmail just to learn
something. But I would still need a spam filter at grex to do that.
Testing lynx at mail.google.com. Lynx supports ssl. Faster than opera.
I don't have an account to log into for testing purposes. Jonathan, the
problem with links might be the ssl requirement.
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keesan
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response 432 of 480:
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Feb 27 22:57 UTC 2007 |
I have been unable to get IMAP working between pine and fastmail. All I did
was disable pine from sending mail. I was supposed to type several long lines
into .pinerc with .vi. Eventually I gave up and used pico. This changed my
sender to mailmessagingengine.com somehow. When I tried to mail to myself
I was keesan@mailmessagingengine.com
It would be much easier to change the login in .procmailrc than to edit
.pinerc Does anyone else have PINE working at grex with IMAP and some free
mail account?
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scholar
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response 433 of 480:
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Feb 27 23:22 UTC 2007 |
lordy.
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cross
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response 434 of 480:
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Feb 27 23:30 UTC 2007 |
Regarding #431; For about the third time, YES, YOU CAN USE PINE ON GREX TO
READ MAIL ON GMAIL VIA POP. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DOWNLOAD IT TO YOUR LOCAL
MACHINE.
Gmail isn't slow. Your computer is slow. Sorry, there it is.
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ball
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response 435 of 480:
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Feb 27 23:49 UTC 2007 |
My computers are slow and when I dial in through a mobile
phone my connection to Grex isn't all that quick. Berkeley
mail is lightning fast though! :-)
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kingjon
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response 436 of 480:
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Feb 27 23:55 UTC 2007 |
#432: You shouldn't have to edit .pinerc manually. Pine has a built-in setup
utility for just that purpose. The email provider should give you an IP address
and port to connect to for POP or IMAP and an IP address and port for SMTP (to
send). The line you probably want, should you decide to edit .pinerc by hand,
begins "incoming-folders=" (assuming you want to keep your mailbox here).
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keesan
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response 437 of 480:
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Feb 28 00:32 UTC 2007 |
I did edit something of the sort as instructed by Fastmail. They did not
provide IP addresses, just a list of what to type. It failed miserably.
How would one set up pine here to do popmail from a free account some place
else, and does it automatically download mail? My IMAP setup tried to send
via that other account, which I did not need to do.
Gmail is designed for a fast connection. All webmails are slow for me.
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keesan
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response 438 of 480:
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Feb 28 00:36 UTC 2007 |
I just discovered that when I tried sending myself a mail to here, it ended
up at my fastmail account (before I undid the IMAP setup). That is NOT what
I want, I want mail sent there to end up here so I can read it with pine.
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kingjon
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response 439 of 480:
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Feb 28 01:35 UTC 2007 |
In "IP address" I meant to include "domain name." Like I said, with pine, which
includes an extensive internal setup feature, it should be unnecessary to edit
.pinerc by hand.
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keesan
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response 440 of 480:
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Feb 28 03:00 UTC 2007 |
Apparently IMAP works by having the mail go some place else but reading it
here. So I would have to forward any mail from here to there and then read
it here? To configure pine for IMAP setup/config Z. It is much simpler to
just edit a .procmailrc file and probably catches more spam than fastmail.
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