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?"

Comments

Culture differences, etc.

[Alien54]

As seen in the article:

Cultural issues also contribute to the problem. Many spammers in Asia say they do not understand why spam is a problem.

"It's a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer," said Zhao Peng, owner of a computer store in Hong Kong.

Of course what is a sign of respect there, may be a sign of disrepect in the here.

never mind the chinese open relay problem, which is also a real hassle.

Re:Ban Asia???

[Xxooss_Gemfyre]

France? Yes France is banned

Re:Filtering email

[sjanes71]

You probably do not need to write it yourself. :)

Seriously consider using something like Tagged Message Delivery Agent, it covers just about every feature on your list, but no 4-digit codes for people to fiddle with-- they just reply to the reply to. Since 99% of all spam has a bogus return address, this works very well. I installed it Monday, and after some testing found it to be quite nice. I don't think I'll have much work to convince my associates at work to adopt it. We're all so sick of getting spam.

You can configure TMDA to create an automatic whitelist for people so you don't have to manually add people to it. I'm so happy with it that I no longer munge my e-mail addresses anymore. And I haven't even gotten into using the self-destructing e-mail address features yet.

Re:One Great Solution!

[mjh]

Hmm. Perhaps my SMTP server should keep track of who I send email to, so it can automatically accept the replies and block the others. There'd be problems with that of course, since replies don't always come from the same address. But it's an idea to play with.

Check out TMDA. It will allow you to do exactly that. You can set it up so that all outgoing email get's a "dated" return address. That return address will be valid for 5days (by default). After which TMDA will reject any responses.

TMDA does quite a bit more than that, too.

So it's going to cost me even more money?

[Mustang Matt]

You want me to pay for a translator to contact a bunch of deadbeat sysadmins that aren't going to care if I complain or not because they leave their systems open to make money?

Umm... No. If you know anyone that will translate to Chinese for free let me know. I'd like to send some explitives.

Re:When I contact a French ISP...

[Choron]

That was funny, look everybody's laughing !