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Walling off Asian E-mail to Prevent Spam

SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "Seems there's been lots of spam news lately. This piece from Wired describes how frustrated sysadmins in the West are responding to a torrent of Asian spam by simply refusing all e-mail from that part of the world. As anyone who's ever reported spam to Asian ISPs can attest, getting a response of any kind is almost impossible, so some ISPs are simply giving up on receiving any mail from them. Setting up barriers like this is regrettable, but when the originating ISPs refuse to take responsibility for the actions of their users or close their open mail servers, there would seem to be no other choice. Has anyone ever had any kind of constructive conversation with one of these ISPs to see why they are unable or unwilling to do anything?"

8 of 662 comments (clear)

  1. Ban Asia??? by Markvs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sure, why not. Heck, I blocked France on principle!

    --
    46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
    1. Re:Ban Asia??? by Jay+L · · Score: 4, Funny

      I don't block France... I just refuse to let them fly over my airspace.

  2. Walling off Asian email?! by qurob · · Score: 4, Funny


    Is this why my mail order bride isn't writing back to me?

  3. Re:An interesting counter point... by CodeMonky · · Score: 5, Funny

    what you don't know is that the client was hunted down and shot.

    --
    --"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
  4. Re:Setback for the net? by Skirwan · · Score: 5, Funny
    What about getting laws that say that unsolicitated mail is illegal?
    That's brilliant! Then, we can make a law that outlaws terrorism! And then fascism! And rudeness, and poor driving, and taking the last donut! Hell, we could just make a law that outlaws 'being mean' in general!

    And while we're at it, we should make it illegal to respond sarcastically to extremely simplistic solutions to complex problems! Yeah!

    --
    Damn the Emperor!
  5. Dealing with Chinese spam ;-) by Ryu2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    As most /.ers should know by now, the Chinese government just ordered all ISPs in China to start monitoring
    email for subversive phrases and the like, so just reply to
    Chinese spam with little replies of the form at the end of this spam.
    Might be a useful tactic on companies who think that unsolicited
    email is "just regular advertising".

    Bill

    "Jack(export manager)" wrote:
    >
    > Dear Sir
    > How are you .
    >
    > We are a lighting factory in China ,It is glad
    > to introduce ourselves to you:
    >
    > I am XUBIN (Jack) , XUBIN is my chinese name , you can just
    > call me Jack !! , I am export manager of [deleted] ,
    > China, our group have four factory
    [snipped]
    >
    > Here is our company profile :
    >

    [Rest of sales talk snipped]

    (And now, the reply)

    Thank you for your coded order. The weapons and ammunition
    will ship by way of the usual route in ten days, and you
    already know our secret Swiss bank account number to
    wire the payment to.

    It is a pleasure doing business with you for so long,
    and I hope your cause will prevail. I am new to this
    particular computer, so I hope the encryption is
    working and the monitoring authorities cannot read
    what I am sending you.

    Long live the Falun Gong! Free Tibet!

    Best regards,
    Your arms supplier

    --
    There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
  6. When I contact a French ISP... by lww · · Score: 5, Funny

    they usually surrender right away ;)

  7. Re:Watch out with that scheme by Phroggy · · Score: 4, Funny

    The trouble is that every address you use gets on spam lists and gets spammed forever. By having 100's of addresses, you get 100's of times more spam than you otherwise would. Even if you can filter it on arrival so you don't have to see it, it's still clogging your bandwidth and you can always filter a legitimate email.

    Hmm, what about this?

    Run your own DNS and mail servers, and use your own domain name. Generate a unique hostname every time you need an e-mail address, and use yourname@00001.yourdomain.com as the address. After you're done with that e-mail address, delete the hostname from the DNS, or change it to resolve to 127.0.0.1 or something. You might still get DNS queries, but that shouldn't take much bandwidth at all, especially since DNS is cached.

    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;