At 04:35 PM 9/5/97 -0400, Jeremy Elson wrote:
I had two very similar incidents of PSI not knowing what was going on. I've gotten a lot of spam that originated from PSI dialup users but using Earthlink as a mail relay; for example, this one:
Recognize that Earthlink is a "national" provider by virtue of the fact that its customers are allowed to connect through PSI and UUNEt POPs (and other ISP's POPs?). Just last week I established an Earthlink dial-up acount for one of my relatives. Many of the Earthlink POP phone numbers turned out to be Phone numbers belonging to PSI, UUNET. It was interesting that the PPP Dial-up logon user ID was of the form: "ELN/userid" The "ELN/" in front of the userid stands for Earthlink Network, so that PSI/UUNET knows to which ISP to route the particular dial-up user. I would suggest that your particular Spammer IS an Earthlink User, (who happens to dial-in through a PSI POP) In this instance, I guess PSI would have to be considered "just an innocent carrier" like the local phone company that also helps the Spammer reach his ISP (Earthlink) [One alternative thought, (and it's a messy one)... Most ISP's can restrict their mail gateways to accept their customers only, but I wonder if Earthlink would be able to configure its mail server to prohibit customers of PSI's and UUNEt's Dial-up services from using Earthlink's mail server.] Russ __________________________________________________________________ Russ Haynal - Internet Consultant, Instructor, Speaker "Helping organizations gain the most benefit from the Internet" russ@navigators.com http://navigators.com 703-729-1757 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Author:"Internet; A Knowledge Odyssey" (Top-rated CD-ROM Tutorial) Available from MindQ Publishing: http://www.mindq.com