Slashdot Mirror
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?"
- 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 [says Slashdot]
Anti-spam activists confirm that a growing number of beleaguered systems administrators are now blocking all e-mail originating from Asia from their systems [says the article]Bollocks, says anyone reading it with a critical eye. There are no references or sources for this sweeping "all Asian email" statement. The single reference is to Spamhaus which implements selective listing of domains that persistently generate or carry spam and decline to respond to spam reports. Most of their listed ISP's are currently US based. There is specific mention of two Chinese ISP's, and none from any other Asian nation.
To make a story out of this, you have to cite metrics. The fact that Spamhaus are currently blacklisting China Telecomm no more proves that "the west" is blocking "the east" than a story about anyone temporarily blacklisting AOL (again) proves that there is some mass move to block "the west".
Without giving metrics, you're just providing anecdotes. Persuasive anecdotes, sure, that probably appeal to our personal experiences, but those are the most dangerous kind, because they stop you looking for the real story and asking the real questions.
The real question here isn't "Why do Spamhaus currently blacklist China Telecomm?" but "Why don't Spamhaus currently blacklist Roadrunner?" or any of another half dozen ignorant ISP's that deny that they are injecting spam even in the face of unequivocable header evidence. Perhaps we in the "west" (sweeping-generalisations-r-us) could go about cleaning up our own house before we go gunning for those coming late to the party.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Do the reading. Despite the shrieking tone of the article, what we are talking about here is Spamhaus blacklisting China Telecom, not "all Asian ISP's". That's the entire story. And Spamhaus themselves suggest that their list should be used in conjunction with an open relay list.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Other things you can do with TMDA include:
- Requring anyone unknown to you to send a confirmation
- Automatically adding all valid confirmations to your "known" list
- Generating sender email addresses, that will allow a specific sender (such as a mailing list) to send you email. No one other than that specific sender will be able to use a sender address
- Generating keyword email addresses. This is similar to what you're talking about already. Where you generate unique addresses, each of which will be allowed to get to your mailbox. But will also allow you to track who is giving out your email address.
TMDA takes a little bit of work to be able to understand what's going on, but once you get it set up, it's pretty effective.Good luck.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Actually I get attacked a lot from wandaoo.fr. So banning France here would be an option. I get attacked more from there than from Asia.