Subject: Re: Spammers answering TMDA Queries

From: Scott Kitterman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 20:38:08 -0400

On Tuesday 02 October 2007 18:49, Russ Housley wrote:
> The Secretariat tells me that Spammers are responding to TDMA queries
> so that their mail goes through.  They have made the suggestion that
> we clear the list of people once per year.  This would mean that a
> legitimate user of a list that uses TDMA would get a TDMA query once
> a year if they are not subscribed to any ietf.org mail list.  There
> is no TDMA query for people who are on at least one ietf.org mail list.
>
> Here is the info that I have:
> >  > Russ wants to know how many people have responded to the TMDA
> >  > challenge but are not on any IETF mailing list.
> >
> >1025 mail addresses have "confirmed" their address.  I would bet that
> >at least 20% of the confirmed are spam addresses (or autoconfirmed
> >addresses)
>
> Thoughts?
>
Randomly unsubscribing non-abusing mailing list subscribers is unlikely to be 
an effective spam fighting tool.  If people spam an IETF list, unsubscribe 
them.  If not, don't.

It's not clear to me what problem you are trying to solve.

Scott K

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:12:20 +1300

On 2007-10-03 11:49, Russ Housley wrote:
> The Secretariat tells me that Spammers are responding to TDMA queries so 
> that their mail goes through.  They have made the suggestion that we 
> clear the list of people once per year.  This would mean that a 
> legitimate user of a list that uses TDMA would get a TDMA query once a 
> year if they are not subscribed to any ietf.org mail list.  There is no 
> TDMA query for people who are on at least one ietf.org mail list.
> 

A little history... I manually scanned the TMDA white list about
a year ago, or rather I scanned the ~700 addresses that had then
confirmed themselves. I didn't keep the relevant files on grounds
of privacy protection, but I recall that around 30 of the addresses
were self-evidently spammers that we removed manually; there were quite
a lot that were self-evidently genuine. However, there were a large
number which just couldn't be classified by inspection. I can easily
believe the 20% estimate.

Speaking personally, I think annual reconfirmation is quite reasonable.
The message sent to the user should make it clear that it is an
annual process.

     Brian

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From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:11:58 -0700

> The message sent to the user should make it clear that it is an

Except... the annual confirmation is probably going to get accidentally
deleted by a lot of people because they think it's the monthly notice.

If this is a real problem, wouldn't it be better to take it up with the 
mailman
folks since I'd expect that it's not just ietf? I've been working with 
them on
dkim related stuff and they are quite reasonable folks. Maybe they have some
ideas on this front.

       Mike