[Scspamcop] Re: Stop Processing Usenet Posts

[Mike Easter]

SpamCop Admin wrote:
> In a few days, SpamCop will stop processing Usenet posts.  Abuse of
> Usenet reporting has been a LOT of trouble for a long time, and we've
> had enough.  We're not going to deal with it anymore.

SC's ability to chain email tracelines doesn't translate particularly
well to usenet posts.

The algorithm took the simplistic approach that if there was an NPH
line, NNTP-Posting-Host, to use that.  If there wasn't, there was no SC
tracing attempted.  Not particularly sophisticated, but I don't know how
I would write/imagine an algo for usenet headers.

There's a lot of judgment involved in usenet tracing because the ability
to determine bogosity is more complicated/weaker than email headers.
One important trick is to gain experience by looking at a lot of normal
Path lines so that you can get a feeling about how 'elements' of the
Path line would be expected to appear on the basis of that experience
with a lot of normal Path lines without bogosity.  Familiarizing with
the appearance of the normal newsservers.  Then if there is bogosity
arising at some part of the Path by coming at the bogosity from 'both
ends', to be able to recognize that condition of an 'incongruous' Path.
Margie Arbon had a useful webpage about it.

I've never been interested in notifying providers about usenet spam, but
taking SC's weak parsing ability out of the equation altogether leaves
something of a vacuum, as the only other option is to do it manually.
There is no other usenet parsing/reporting algorithmic function
available.


-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin