On Sat, 4 Jan 1997, Barry Shein wrote:
ridiculous story about how my refusing his mail with a 550 error is making his software do this, ridiculous if you know how mail actually works, that's like getting a User Unknown error, you just throw it on the floor, he runs sendmail 8.7 under Unix, telnet to his SMTP port at iq-internet.com.
Spammers don't send mail using sendmail or any other standard mailer. They use special custom-built spamming programs that are geared to sending huge quantities of the same message to LARGE mailing lists quickly and efficiently. It's possible that his software has a bug that isn't dealing with errors properly or it's possible that the mechanism to deal with replies is recting badly to your mailer. When I say "replies" I am referring to the fact that spammers do not want you to reply to their email. If they receive replies, they process them with some sort of robot. In the simplest case, all replies are sent to the bit bucket. Now because Sprint's spam policy states that spamming is OK as long as you remove people's addresses form your list if they request it, their robot has to deal with that case and all spam from iq-internet informs people that they can reply with "NO MAIL" in the subject to be removed from the list. But spammers have another problem and they are getting more sophisticated in dealing with that. I refer to the problem created by irate spam recipients who then mailbomb the spammer. Spammers are learning to deal with this by returning the messages to the source with an error. I suspect that their spam software is screwing up and treating your reject messages as a mail bombe and they are thus returning them back to you creating a classic email loop.
AT ABOUT 1AM EST THE MAIL LOOPING STARTS AGAIN, AFTER A FEW HOURS HIATUS. HE STARTED IT UP AGAIN!
Unbelievable, I'm sorry, but this sort of behavior is going to destroy these networks, and I mean behavior on the part of people like Sprint. Bad people will happen, I know that, we all know that, but the people at Sprint have absolutely no excuse for their behavior other than sheer gullibility or abrogation of any shred responsibility.
Barry, I agree with everyon on this list that this is NOT the place to be discussing the problem. Please take this to the proper forum. If you would post an account of your troubles along with the MX records for sprint.com, sprintlink.net, etc. to the alt.2600 newsgroup then this problem would not be occurring. Are you a SPRINT customer? If not, you should be reporting this flood attack to your upstream provider who appears to be Alternet from my vantage point. It doesn't matter whether it is a ping flood, SYN flood or mailbomb attack, your provider can work their way up the channels to the source of the problem. In the interim they can install filters on their router port to you that will block port 25 from the offending site. This takes the load off your shoulders and also frees up the bandwidth that you are paying your upstream provider for. Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com