The domain multicians.org has been registered by Tom Van Vleck for the Multicians web site. I offer this as a service to the community of Multicians, and I'm paying the costs myself.
Anyone on the Multicians list may request a mail address at multicians.org, with the following properties:
- Incoming mail to a multicians.org address is relayed to the user using a procmail script at my account.
- This service introduces additional delay and dependencies.
- Some incoming mail that appears to be spam or malware is rejected.
- Mail that appears to be spam will have this indicated in the X-Spam-Status header. See below.
(Incoming mail is no longer greylisted as of June 2022. Spammers learned to avoid it.)
Administration of this facility consists of the editor, editing a text file.
If I'm unavailable, registration requests will back up.
I can't prevent mail delays caused by the ISP hosting multicians.org (currently 
pair.com),
or my own errors, or guys with backhoes, or suicidal squirrels.
If these terms don't suit your needs, don't use the feature.
To request an address, fill out the registration form and check the appropriate box.
If your mail address changes, fill out the form again. If you change the mail address that multicians.org forwards to without telling me, and someone sends mail to your multicians.org address, there will be a bounce message sent to multicians.org. This message will be discarded, because I can't tell real bounces from the hundreds of spurious bounces generated by spammer activity.
Please do not use your multicians.org address to sign up to high-traffic mailing lists. Too much forwarded traffic will bog down the server at pair.com and incur the wrath of Pair administrators, who may then punish us without contacting me.
Privacy
Your mail address is hidden, but a stranger can send you mail via this facility. I will not sell your name or address.
To and From addresses and mail subjects are logged briefly, in order to assist in spam detection. Message content is not logged.
Use of this facility for junk email (spam) or other unsolicited commercial use is prohibited. The fee for misuse of multicians.org is $5000 per message. (Not that I have ever collected a penny.)
Spam Filtering
Pair Networks, the ISP that hosts multicians.org, implemented advanced spam filtering features: virus rejection, black hole list rejection, and bad address rejection. You will see the following consequences on mail sent to you via the multicians.org forwarder:
-
Incoming mail from senders on the Spamhaus SBL/XBL will be rejected. I have used this list (via SpamBouncer) for over a year and have seen no false positives. This feature should cut out a large amount of spam from the major spam sources.
-
Messages will be scanned for viruses and phishing by
ClamAV and rejected if they match, again with no logging.
-
The mail you get will have new headers, representing filtering by
SpamAssassin v3
and headers will be added to the message showing the result of the checks. A header like
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=4.0
indicates the value returned by Pair's SpamAssassin. If SpamAssassin sees SPF or DKIM failures, it will increase the "hits" score. You can filter on X-Spam-Status in your mail server or client.
You may wish to implement your own additional spam blacklists and whitelists.
You should see less spam and not lose any mail. Initial statistics show spam cut to nearly zero.
Pair provides no logs, quarantined messages, or backup facilities: a rejected message is gone without a trace or chance of recovery. Rejected messages will cause a well-behaved sending server to inform the sender.
Please keep your own client-side spam and virus filters!
Pair sometimes changes or disables its spam filters without notice, allowing spam to pass through.
Also, virus filters catch previously known viruses but new unknown ones may get through ClamAV.
Only you know what mail is really unwanted.
If you cannot or do not wish to implement your own spam filters, you could forward your mail to a Gmail mailbox.
If you get mail that you don't like, please do not report multicians.org as a spammer. This just causes lost mail for other Multicians and wastes my time. If you register a mail address on the Multicians page, then strangers can send you mail. Deal with it, or ask me to remove your listing.
Bayes Filtering
SpamAssassin's Bayes filtering will not be used, because
- There would only be one Bayes database for all of multicians.org, and one person's spam might be another person's desirable mail, for example mail about mortgages.
- Your messages would have to be retained and I would have to look at them to decide which were spam and which ham, for training the database. This is a privacy issue and requires substantial administration.
- The Pair implementation caps the Bayes database size, meaning that over time the Bayes implementation works worse and worse, even if spammers don't try to poison it.
SpamAssassin Headers
Here are examples of the headers you will see in mail sent to you at a multicians.org address and forwarded to your real address. (This example was sent from a Gmail account. Google sends mail with DKIM and SPF.) You may choose to filter spam based on the X-Spam-Flag header.
Received: from mailwash59.pair.com (mailwash59.pair.com [66.39.2.59])
(using TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 (256/256 bits)
key-exchange X25519 server-signature RSA-PSS (2048 bits) server-digest SHA256)
(No client certificate requested)
by mta.vps2952.pairvps.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 11EE51C043A
for <thvv@multicians.org>; Thu, 7 Mar 2024 13:22:00 -0500 (EST)
Received: from mail-ej1-f41.google.com (mail-ej1-f41.google.com [209.85.218.41])
(using TLSv1.3 with cipher TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (128/128 bits)
key-exchange X25519 server-signature RSA-PSS (2048 bits) server-digest SHA256)
(No client certificate requested)
by mailwash59.pair.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 80A7E8BE08
for <thvv@multicians.org>; Thu, 7 Mar 2024 13:21:59 -0500 (EST)
Received: by mail-ej1-f41.google.com with SMTP id a640c23a62f3a-a45aa7cb2b3so3809466b.3
for <thvv@multicians.org>; Thu, 07 Mar 2024 10:21:59 -0800 (PST)
X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
d=1e100.net; s=20230601; t=1709835718; x=1710440518;
h=to:subject:message-id:date:from:mime-version:x-gm-message-state
:from:to:cc:subject:date:message-id:reply-to;
bh=tRMmPRxTqcGLbUsFTj4peatX8ecaQ33gLwx+5XGVpH0=;
b=HecP43EBzxJNz8rhuQtJ49pSK5ozDRFwQ14NUndoFZlVsYoGQ2dISiwomBLyb7uzOl
1j28qrxkfCTJRP+ZihFIF1ury7U/gwbKik92xi4sedv0s95z+C8yNGe3jQ5uvwyTn3Lk
rAULAWubyLZBL8QcWNG3PqKonxzxW9CPK8z668sHCEfFdEqNNJs4E6fsayimdjaBKx8P
oWCIGBk1+0AarXsFX4SEDKKyNhYNjBgU6d8Mstc5vzy423ZEWsY6HBQ8RAOArey6i90h
/ia2CnJ9rZ2uhAgQG/Qu5Rhrsw1tiIS0TTKWKSY+qeNv6GbuHKrwthozPvQKR+a7leQ6
7RGg==
X-Gm-Message-State: AOJu0Yxw6JGypMep37DGF3zlItzMuqZoCHWA805DKN7xUrHHTk2aMK+D
HXfrmN2GxnnwNkK6IamZ8OyjgdArplZ5uAKwsAyWj33m4J0RRNPEGXE7sMY+WyGQYob0ooKLO30
CYKr5Wd3hWObvD8phVwQwYkOAV/pOXmI=
X-Google-Smtp-Source: AGHT+IGb4XWWcdqSq60VELbVcWWZkLXQLQy4B22zObejf7+zF3Bf8c5wLE8MlzduIwzMeyRuoufln5TObRqdSYKq24o=
X-Received: by 2002:a17:906:1c51:b0:a43:80e2:98dc with SMTP id
l17-20020a1709061c5100b00a4380e298dcmr13430000ejg.32.1709835717556; Thu, 07
Mar 2024 10:21:57 -0800 (PST)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="00000000000091c44b061316262b"
Received-SPF: pass (gmail.com ... _spf.google.com: Sender is authorized to use 'thvv64@gmail.com' in 'mfrom' identity (mechanism 'include:_netblocks.google.com' matched)) receiver=mailwash59.pair.com; identity=mailfrom; envelope-from="thvv64@gmail.com"; helo=mail-ej1-f41.google.com; client-ip=209.85.218.41
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.5 required=4.0 tests=FREEMAIL_ENVFROM_END_DIGIT,FREEMAIL_FORGED_FROMDOMAIN,FREEMAIL_FROM,HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS,HTML_MESSAGE,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_H3,RCVD_IN_MSPIKE_WL,SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_PASS,T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=disabled version=4.000000
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Filtered: 662dab9e5ba9f661e1d271d3f2e0e047
X-Spam-Check-By: mailwash59.pair.com
X-Virus-Check-By: mailwash59.pair.com
X-Scanned-By: mailmunge 3.10 on 66.39.2.59
X-Sorted: Default
X-MultRule: accepted addr
20 July 2002, updated 26 May 2005, 04 August 2005, 01 May 2006, 13 Nov 2006, 07 Mar 2024