On Wed, Oct 29, 1997 at 03:12:46PM -0800, Dalvenjah FoxFire wrote:
Is there a good reason why the throwway folks (those mentioned above) haven't blocked port 25 from their dialups to the outside internet?
This is on point. As long as the dialup providers do not see fit to impose _some_ sort of filtering on the outgoing mail of their customers, at least until the account is validated, this crap will continue.
The only reason I can think of that would stop this would be if a user subscribes to earthlink, but uses a UUnet dialin, that customer's software would be set up to use the Earthlink SMTP servers.
The instance of multihomed dialup customers can be dealt with without letting throwaway accounts cause the problem that they do, if the providers cared to do so. Personally, I think that blackholing entire commercial providers will solve the problem. I'd use a filter that bounced headers back to postmasters with a note explaining why the filter was in place. In fact, I may well do just this on my system... a Spaminator<tm> is in planning here, and we're not a paid system, so I can get away with more than some folks.
I've currently blocked all of UUnet and PSInet from my mail server - spam about dropped in half. But I'm still getting spam through what appear to be unsuspecting relays - and the source is one of those dialup, throwaway accounts.
See above. Until a concensus is reached on a legal way to force the administrations of these dialup providers to behave in a reasonable, ethical manner (cooperating with people engaging in fradulent behavior, when there's a method with a low bar to entry to avoid it, is unethical), this problem will continue to be of the order of magnitude it currently is. I think it will get fixed the first time some ISP is named as an accessory in a fraud suit, but I don't want to wait that long. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Pedantry. It's not just a job, it's an Tampa Bay, Florida adventure." -- someone on AFU +1 813 790 7592