Re: a note to those who would automate their rejection notices
pv> of the foundational principles which made the internet pv> possible and which made it different from alternatives such as pv> OSI, very few remain.
Would SPF <http://spf.pobox.com/> be a bit less destructive than many other proposals to counter "trivial forgery".
No. Nor will Yahoo's recently announced technology make any real difference. Preventing forgery is a way of protecting domain names as "service marks" and also ensuring that your own or your customers' non-spam output isn't snared in a bunch of false-positive trappery. But it won't stop or even slow the rate at which spam is sent or is received. Spammers still lie, but they are no longer as dumb as fence posts, and they can register throw-away domains whose crypto-authenticity is completely valid, even in the presence of wide scale wormspoor-proxy usage. It could be that I'm just especially irritable this year, or it could be that the reinvention frequency of bad ideas really is growing at the same rate as the internet's population. I no longer think that E-mail as we know it will survive. But I would be less irritable about it if the people who keep proposing to "save" it would (a) do their homework, (b) assume that spammers are going to try to adapt, and (c) think about the side effects of the tools they deploy. This is information warfare. "Warfare." You aren't fighting the terrain or the elements or some mindless bacteria. You're fighting other humans, and they are armed, committed, dangerous, and adaptive. In that light, I look at things like Bayesian filters or Vipul's Razor and I wonder, why is the "D" in Vern's DCC (see www.rhyolite.com/dcc) so difficult to predict a need for? (Y'all already know my views on relay-probing without spam-in-hand, but the tie-in here is "how can you fight spam if your principles aren't different from the people you're fighting? where exactly do you think it will end?") Anyway, I hope folks will stop sending automated rejection notices to domains who were not involved, other than by forgery, in the transmission of a virus or spam. In other words, there's relevant operational content in this thread, and when "fighting" spam it would be reasonable to avoid hurting uninvolved third parties. AOL, please listen.
On Saturday, December 27, 2003 3:23 PM [GMT-5=EST], Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com> wrote:
Anyway, I hope folks will stop sending automated rejection notices to domains who were not involved, other than by forgery, in the transmission of a virus or spam. In other words, there's relevant operational content in this thread, and when "fighting" spam it would be reasonable to avoid hurting uninvolved third parties. AOL, please listen.
Cox in particular was doing this until recently (we got their attention rather quickly after blacklisting their main mail servers). We were being joe jobbed badly, and cox's mail servers were generating massive amounts of bounces per minute, and out of all the bounces, cox was generating the most (at least 3/4 of them) The result was that each one of their mail servers (more then a dozen) was sending one bounce per connection, and launching anywhere between 5-12 connections at a time, then reconnecting right away after sending the single bounce and disconnecting. We quickly ran out of connection slots on both the primary and secondary mail spoolers, leaving us unable to get incoming mail until we firewalled out cox's mail servers. One would think, if your going to run a cluster of mail servers to handle your mail, that you would rate limit your bounces so that people (like myself) who can't afford to have a dozen or more heavy duty mail servers don't end up getting DoS'd by your mail server's ability to pump out millions of messages per hour. Someone said on one of the newsgroups, "Well, maybe they setup their system correctly, and don't see a need to change something that works." The problem is, theres a difference between properly configuring a mail server and responsibly configuring a mail server. When you responsibly configure a mail server, you take into account OTHER people's systems and how THEY will be able to deal with your server. Part of the issue comes with when you accept a mail, then bounce afterwards, instead of just bouncing after RCPT TO: or DATA. When you delay the bounce, you will generate a bounce to the From: address, even if it is forged. When you outright reject the message, you pretty much reduce the risk of that happening by far, as the sending server will see that the message was rejected, and hopefully move on. Now, this works with open proxies, but not with open relays. Do spammers use open relays much anymore? No, not really. Why leave a trail back to yourself when you can hide completely? AOL has _not_ done this to us though, we've seen maybe one or two bounces from AOL's servers, but nothing even remotely close to what Cox is doing. Just my thoughts, flame away :) -- Brian Bruns The Summit Open Source Development Group Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources http://www.sosdg.org The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org
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