How come it is always about controlling the symptoms and not the illness? The vast majority of these "spam drones" are compromised WINDOWS machines. If the operating system and dominant email applications so easily allows the users' machines to be taken over by a third party, then there is something wrong with the operating system and the mail applications. It occurs to me that the solution is not to limit the range of destruction, but to defuse the bomb. Perhaps the focus for a solution should move up the model to layer 7. - Mark -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Michael.Dillon@radianz.com Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 8:47 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Time to check the rate limits on your mail servers
Do you let your customers send an unlimited number of emails per day? Per hour? Per minute? If so, then why?
Doing that - especially now when this article has hit the popular press and there's going to be lots more people doing the same thing - is going to be equivalent of hanging out a "block my email" sign.
I don't understand your comment. This is an arms race. The spammers and botnet builders are attempting to make their bots use the exact same email transmission channels as your customers' email clients. They are getting better at doing this as time goes on. I think we are at the point where the technical expertise of the botnet builders is greater than the technical expertise of most people working in email operations. ...