On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Dan Ellis wrote:
1) Residential Policy: Enable SMTPAUTH and disallow relaying unless the customer has a valid username/password. If you're not paying for a mailbox, you don't get to relay outbound. This should not break anything except those residential accounts that *should* be commercial anyway.
2) Broadband commercial: This is the difficult one. These are the customers that aren't big enough to rightfully run their own mailserver, but they are big enough to have roaming users on their networks (coffee shops, branch offices, hotels, SOHO....). They expect relaying service for either their mailserver or for all their various PC's. At the same time, they don't have many, if any mailboxes through the ISP. My thought is that they should ONLY be allowed to relay via SMTPAUTH by using a residential mailbox login/pass OR they need to purchase a commercial relay service (expensive because of the openness of it) for their IP space.
3) T1+ : These customers should not be allowed to relay unless they purchase (expensive) relay services for their IP space. Of course, they can always use a residential mailbox, but will have to use SMTPAUTH for it and will be restrained by the same policies residential mailboxes have (low tolerance tarpitting,...).
While the amount of effort you put into this so far is commendable, I really think you're barking up the wrong tree. At the end of the day, what have you done, besides annoy your customers and increase the load on your support staff? I don't really see what you're suggesting being anything other than a huge effort, solving the wrong problem. For any responsible ISP, the problem is the spam coming into your mailservers, not leaving. As long as you quickly castrate the people who do relay spam through you, you're not going to have an egress spam problem. Since you seem to have countless hours to invest in this problem, you'd be better off writing a log parser to identify WHEN somebody is relaying spam through you, so you can react. Something else I've seen implemented is rate limiting. Keep track of the number of messages sent by an IP over a variable amount of time and implement thresholds. I'd love to hear some of the conversations you have with your leased line customers, when you tell them they have to pay for "(expensive) relay services" to send mail through your mail server. How many times will they laugh before hanging up on you? :) That's like the IRS trying to charge you for the forms... And I'd also like to see the looks on your technical support staff's faces when you tell them they need to assist your ENTIRE USER BASE in switching to authenticated SMTP :) And then you have to deal with the customers who have MTAs that don't support authenticated SMTP...and on and on. Whenever the solution is more expensive than the problem, you need to go back to the drawing board. Andy --- Andy Dills Xecunet, Inc. www.xecu.net 301-682-9972 ---