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  • From: Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] E-mail address hiding service
  • Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2015 09:43:28 +0300

On Wed, 15 Apr 2015 18:09:10 -0500
David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 04/15/2015 10:58 AM, Vlad Glagolev wrote:
> > Hello all!
> >
> > As I told earlier[0], we have a huge spam traffic to our distro mail
> > addresses. Personally I get like 80-100 spam e-mails daily, especially
> > recently (maybe 2 or 3 weeks), which is *not* good. And our filtering
> > system seems to be non-existent, really.
>
> We don't have any filtering system, since it's just a direct alias.
> Having your own statistical filtering system would probably solve the
> entire problem.

I'm not talking about pro mail filtering system as-is in a standalone
server with dkim, spf, greylisting, rdns check, etc. -- I was sure
there's something besides forwarding. I think it must not be just a dumb
forwarding service too: for example I receive a lot of backscatter
mail, where I have stealth@ in RCPT TO and dkowis@ in To: header.
That's sad.

There must be at least _basic_ checks.

And we should really think about implementing them along with
authentication mechanisms attached to our servers, as a plus -- but
that would be just a feature.

>
> The next generation of the email system will not just be a forwarding
> service, but instead be a staging pop on demand, so you have to request
> your mail, or it gets deleted after 30 days or something. I don't know
> if there will be statistcal spam filtration built in or not.
>
> >
> > I've decided to write a tiny service I mentioned in the previous mail
> > in February. And here it is.
> >
> > I'm pleased to introduce the MAGE[1]: Mail Address GEneration service.
> > *sigh*
> >
> > It does the following:
> >
> > 1. Gets a query string containing base64-encoded data
> > 2. Checks for its length (currently max size is 100 chars)
> > 3. Decodes it
> > 4. If everything's fine, it generates an RGB image in PNG representing
> > original e-mail address according to the website's style[1].
>
> I'm not a huge fan of this, since you cannot copy/paste email
> addresses... But I don't have a spam problem despite being on plenty of
> public emails. I do get probably in the realm of 400+ a day some times,
> but that's why I have crm114.
>
> >
> > There are several cases when it's not possible to generate a picture:
> > - wrong base64 data: decoding error is returned
> > - some internal error occured if rendering is not possible: rendering
> > error is returned (which is a simple pre-rendered error.png file
> > sitting on fs)
> > - wrong or no data is provided (i.e. GET /): usage message is returned
> >
> > I've converted our Developers page[3] as an example.
> > It uses :Mage: alias[4] for that, so you can simply use this string:
> >
> > {{:Mage:...}}
> >
> > to insert the image somewhere on the site.
> >
> > And the string generation is pretty simple, too:
> >
> > $ printf "%s\n" `echo -n user AT domain.tld | base64 -w0`
> > (or whatever way you prefer)
> >
> > The only issue I see here is the problem of displaying these addresses
> > in text browsers like lynx, but how many such visitors do we have?
> >
> > The service is a bit more than 1.5KB of Python code and actually is a
> > pure WSGI application. The only dependencies are:
> >
> > - flup[5]
> > - pil[6] or pillow[7] (PIL is used on the server atm, but that will
> > switch to Pillow on the next upgrade)
> > - DejaVu fonts (dejavu-ttf spell) -- DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf is used here
> > - freetype2 (sure, how would you work with truetype another way?)
> >
> > Special notes:
> > - speedy C version of StringIO (cStringIO) is used
> > - Cache-Control header for one hour is applied on the server
> >
> > And finally: I really dislike the situation with our abandoned and
> > ancient mail system/service and I'm thinking about dropping my distro
> > email address in favour of something at one of my own domains if nothing
> > will be changed anytime soon.
> >
> > But well.. any notes, suggestions and questions are welcome.
> >
> > [0]
> > https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-discuss/2015-February/021885.html
> > [1] http://beta.mage.sourcemage.ru/
> > [2] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/style.css
> > [3] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/Developers
> > [4] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/Alias
> > [5] http://www.saddi.com/software/flup/
> > [6] http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/
> > [7] https://python-pillow.github.io/
> >
> > --
> > Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > SM-Discuss mailing list
> > SM-Discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/sm-discuss
> >
>


--
Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>

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