On May 28, 2008, at 9:03 AM, Sargun Dhillon wrote:
Has Amazon given an official statement on this? It would be nice to get someone from within Amazon to give us their official view on this. It would be even more appropriate for the other cloud infrastructures to join in, and or have some sort of RFC to do with SMTP access within the "cloud." I forsee this as a major problem as the idea of "the cloud" is being pushed more and more. You are talking about a spammers dream. Low cost , powerful resources with no restrictions and complete anonymity.
Personally I'm going to block *.amazonaws.com from my mail server until Amazon gives us a statement on how they are planning on fighting spam from the cloud.
"The cloud" is just a marketing term for a bunch of virtual servers, at least in Amazons case. It's nothing particularly new, just a VPS farm with the same constraints and abuse issues as a VPS or managed server provider. The only reason this is a problem in the case of Amazon is that they're knowingly selling service to spammers, their abuse guy is in way over his head and isn't interested in policing their users unless they're doing something illegal or the check doesn't clear. As long as the spam being sent doesn't violate CAN-SPAM, it's legal. Cheers, Steve