SprintPCS spam policies
I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up on the antispam policies of SprintPCS, so that you will know what to expect if you start getting blocked by their mx.messaging.sprintpcs.com mail servers. Background: One of our customers was infected by one of the viruses that spams SprintPCS cell phones. Naturally we were blocked when this occurred, which is what I would expect. Once we detected the problem, we suspended the customer until they cleaned out the virus. Here's what we discovered from this: When you are blocked by SprintPCS, they simply disconnect the SMTP connection without an error of any kind. They provide no way to contact them on this. We had to have our Sprint Internet sales person find out who to contact. It would have been very helpful if there was contact information displayed on an SMTP banner before disconnecting. When a clueful person finally called me a week later, I was treated with suspicion. It was clear that he didn't believe me when I said a customer was infected by a virus, even though the existence of virii that have that behavior is clear with a quick Google search. He clearly considered me to be a spammer, rather than a responsible ISP. The SprintPCS person finally agreed to remove the block for my network, with the exception of the one mail server that my customer was using. He utterly refused to remove the block for that server, in spite of the fact that it hasn't sent them any spam for a week. This leaves me having to explain to my customers sending legitimate text pages why their email bounces occasionally. It also is ineffective, because I can easily change the IP address of the mail server they're blocking. If anyone has similar experience, I hope you fare better. -- Bruce Robertson, President/CEO +1-775-348-7299 Great Basin Internet Services, Inc. fax: +1-775-348-9412 http://www.greatbasin.net
When I signed up for SprintPCS I was offered a yourname @ sprintpcs.com mail account. They let me chose an alias for the account. So now my cell phone has the email address of: noc @ sprintpcs.com This says something about how well they follow RFCs. -- Joe Hamelin Edmonds, WA, US
I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up on the antispam policies of SprintPCS, so that you will know what to expect if you start getting blocked by their mx.messaging.sprintpcs.com mail servers.
As a non-sprint-related side note, I know of somebody whose AT&T Wireless phone service was rendered completely unusable by incoming spam via the email-to-SMS gateway. The typical rate was one message every 30 minutes, the only solution offered by customer service was to change the phone number. Has anyone ever encountered spammers doing a dictionary attack (emailing all 9999 phone numbers in a NXX) via email-to-SMS gateways?
On Jun 24, 2004, at 2:44 PM, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
Has anyone ever encountered spammers doing a dictionary attack (emailing all 9999 phone numbers in a NXX) via email-to-SMS gateways?
If they didn't before, they surely will now. -davidu ---------------------------------------------------- David A. Ulevitch - Founder, EveryDNS.Net http://david.ulevitch.com -- http://everydns.net ----------------------------------------------------
Eric Kuhnke writes on 6/25/2004 5:44 AM:
As a non-sprint-related side note, I know of somebody whose AT&T Wireless phone service was rendered completely unusable by incoming spam via the email-to-SMS gateway. The typical rate was one message every 30 minutes, the only solution offered by customer service was to change the phone number. Has anyone ever encountered spammers doing a dictionary attack (emailing all 9999 phone numbers in a NXX) via email-to-SMS gateways?
I used to run an email to sms gateway at a previous job (where we consulted for one of india's largest mobile phone providers) I was seeing multiple instances of this even 4..5 years ago. srs -- suresh ramasubramanian suresh@outblaze.com gpg EDEDEFB9 manager, security and antispam operations, outblaze ltd
participants (5)
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Bruce Robertson
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David A.Ulevitch
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Eric Kuhnke
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Joe Hamelin
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Suresh Ramasubramanian