Let's not forget those little smtp daemons that you can install on your local machine to bypass your ISP's smtp server. I've actually installed a couple of them for small clients that needed a mail server their office could send through because Verizon's smtp server will not accept an email address that doesn't end with verizon.com. (I digress) The bottom line is all that email can come from countless thousands of dynamically addressed broadband ISP client machines. Any PIII or PIV machine of reasonable speed can send thousands of email messages per hour. There are lots of email blasting packages out there available for the download. Curtis On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Paul Vixie wrote:
...are doing more to help spam than to stop it, in spite of themselves.
consider microsoft-yahoo-aol's big fad of the moment which is suing spammers and blaming asia. the number one (#1) contributor to spam is open proxies running on windows/xp, several of which are installed by default as side effects of other user activities. spam can now come from tens of millions of untraceable places, and since it's an open proxy rather than an open relay there isn't even a Received: header trail. WHAT a marketing department, though, to be able to (successfully!) blame spam on asia.
but what have we here? i would not have imagined that in 2003 any company could be as blatantly irresponsible as to behave the way telia documents here:
route: 217.208.0.0/13 descr: TELIANET-BLK remarks: Abuse issues should be reported at remarks: http://www.telia.com/security/ remarks: Mail to abuse@telia.net will be auto-replied remarks: and referred to the URL above. origin: AS3301 mnt-by: TELIANET-RR changed: rr@telia.net 20010508 source: RIPE
excuse me, telia, but your customers are spamming me, and i have no plans to teach lartomatic (my homebrew complaintbot) how to log into your web site. it is the year 2003, and you bloody well need to learn how to accept complaints about YOUR CUSTOMERS using a format that is most convenient to THE VICTIMS. (and you should be THANKING US FOR IT since we are DOING YOUR WORK FOR YOU.)
grrrrrrrrrrrrr. clearly i need to stop accepting e-mail from 217.208.0.0/13.
-- -- Curtis Maurand mailto:curtis@maurand.com http://www.maurand.com