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Spam Slows AT&T Email
jonerik writes: "MSNBC has this article about AT&T's frustration with the increasing quantity and sophistication of spam traffic. As has been noted here already, much of it these days is originating from Asia and, according to the article, 'now represents 20 percent of all e-mail floating around the Internet.'"
The War on Spam must be fought on several fronts, not just one. These evildoers can be defeated by striking them in American courts and fixing the open-relay problem in Asia.
The owls are not what they seem
I am in Europe and 99,99% percent of the SPAM I get is from US !
If email weren't open it would never reached the success it has.
This ongoing 'war on spam' will only really be dealt with when two things happen:
1 Sysadmins living in a 'clue fee zone' must be wised up. This means, amoung other things, more education for sysadmins, better products and documentation, better or more translations of documentation, etc. It should be easy to obtain documentation in your local language. Every HOWTO has to have an accurate, up to date translation readily available. As should documentation for proprietory products.
I don't like viruses nor encourage illegal break-and-enter of another person's computer, but a 'whitehat' virus that shuts down the relay component of an email server would be damn handy.
2 The economics of SPAM must be altered, literally turned on their head. It costs to receive bandwidth, but (generally) little, or none at all. (The obvious exception is when you have a bandwidth intensive site that requires nice fat outward pipes). It costs so little to send, just electricity, enough money for a bulk sender (off the shelf or home brewed) and a net connection. Pay the real cost of outgoing mail and watch the volume of spam decrease to an approximation of zero.
Don't know how this last one will be achieved except via a totally new version of 'the net' (or at least a new set of RFC's).
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
I've seen code to trap the spiders the spammers use and fill up their databases with crap. What I haven't seen is a honeypot designed just for spammers - a box that *looks* like an open relay, but not only doesn't forward the spam messages, it logs and possibly automagically retailiates against the originator. The anti-spam groups have had good luck attracting spam with email addresses set aside for that purpose, but we need to take it to the next level and have some anti-spam servers. Maybe just a simple bot to start listening on port 25 and responding like known weak versions of sendmail when accessed would do. Any of the mighty code ghods here at /. want to see what they can come up with?
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Then I think to myself, "this isn't working. there needs to be a fundamental change to how we receive email."
And the first thing that pops into my mind, is white list email. Well, there goes 100% of the spam problem, unless you have sleazy friends.
What happens when someone not on your list sends you an email that you actually need to get? *sigh* It then falls back to us fighting the loosing battle.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
They blame it on Asia due to the high number of open relays and unsecured (socks|http) proxies that spammers have found in that area. I personally have quite lengthy .procmailrc and iptables files that include huge chunks of China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, France, Costa Rica, Argentina *and* the US, because these areas are either too ignorant to run a mailserver properly (as evidenced by the huge number of ancient sendmail configs; I'd imagine they're having a terrible time grokkin' the sendmail docs).
Add to that the number of purely malicious individuals taking their spammy little affairs to servers outside the US to keep bulletproof status, and of course they're going to blame Asia!
He who does nothing to aid us is our enemy, or I think President Shrub said something like that.
Just goes to show the level of technical (in)comprehension among suits and reporters. Both groups seem to have a difficult time using simple words like "originate" properly.
Most of the spam I get comes *via* asia (with a rising amount coming from Spain and Portugal lately too) because there are a lot of abusable relays in those areas. But the actual *origin* for most of it seems to be some guy with a cable modem in Arizona.
Oh, btw, it's just as annoying getting spam for it when you are here in the USA, spam is just annoying period. The most annoying spam I think is when it's for something I might actually be interested in - because there is no way I'd buy ANYTHING that's spamvertised, so a spammer could actually cause me not to get something I want. That's pretty rare though. I think the last time that happened was probably when I got spammed by a BeOS distributor a year or more back.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
One is regulation (which would be cumbersome and probably ineffective, given the global nature of the Internet)
I must disagree. Most spammers are not multi-national corporations trying to attract customers from all over the world. Most spammers have P.O. boxes, toll-free phone numbers, and web sites. Give law enforcement the ability to track these people down, freeze their assets, confiscate their computers, and press charges against them and the spam problem will largely go away. Junk faxes, once a scourge threatening to become as pervasive as spam, has been effectively curtailed with Title 47, Section 227. While there are the occasional junk faxes, the number of them is inconsequential compared to what it was and what it was headed towards.
Technical solutions are being actively developed and some of them are damned effective when installed at a mail server. But such tools, without legislation to address the problem, are analogous to having a bullet-proof vest in a society where it is legal to shoot peopls. Advanced filtering products should be used as an adjunct to tough anti-spam laws, not instead of them.
Anyway, blocking outgoing port 25 is a stupid idea. Many of us work from home and have our own domains, and we legitimately want to have our outgoing mail show our own domains, not @attbi.com or @rr.com or whatever.
There are also some practical problems:
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The downside of it is that if you have a yahoo.com address, but want to run your own smtp server to deliver your mails, then you'd fall foul of such a system. I don't think that's a biggy though - if you could run your own smtp server, you'd probably not use a yahoo.com address you'd have your own domain :).
Actually, this is a pretty big downside for many users. Every once in a while, someone proposes a similar scheme that makes it hard or impossible to "forge" From addresses. This is not exactly that, but it's close enough. The problem is that this is a perfectly legitimate and necessary use of email, and is, in fact, discussed in RFC 822.
The basic problem is that many of us wear quite a few different hats, each of which has one or more email addresses. Suppose I want to send an email using my personal address while I'm at work, or my work address while I'm at home. Suppose I need to reply to some email sent to an official address using that official address as the header From, and that I also want bounces to go to that address so that others at that address can see if my reply was not sufficient (requiring a change in the envelope From). Maybe I do run my own smtp server and domain, but I want to use my spam-trapping yahoo address to reply to yahoo mail (for privacy reasons), and I want to use mutt instead of some stupid web interface. Maybe I'm a sysadmin who wants to set up a number of forwarding addresses (perhaps official addresses for some project on some domain). Now my one-way service has to be a two-way service; instead of just editing the aliases file, I have to set up an account for each of the people who needs to send mail. These are just some of the things that I happen to do on a daily basis and that adoption of your system might make impossible or more of a pain.
Sure, a lot of times this can be solved by some sort of remote access or SMTP auth, but it would certainly be less convenient (especially because some sites are difficult to access remotely). The bigger problems are social: many of the users I know who do these sorts of things aren't the most technically-savvy; many domains are unlikely to introduce the features necessary for full remote access (so then it becomes less of an inconvenience and more of a loss of service).
The good thing about your proposal is that it's opt-in for the sender's domain (whereas most others are opt-in for the recipient's domain), and it therefore gives a domain more control over its email addresses (as opposed to less with other schemes). It allows example.com to say "we want mail from addresses in our domain sent out via only our servers." Presently, anti-relaying provisions in servers make it possible to say "we want only mail from addresses in our domain sent out via our servers." This just completes things.
I guess it depends on your perspective. As a sysadmin, I'd be happy to have the power to turn this on for my domain (though I probably wouldn't, and other domains might not use it -- look at how terrible people are with MX records). As a user, I'd be unhappy if one of my sysadmins turned it on, but happy if some of the domains spammers use and I don't use turned it on. I guess it might be sort of a "not in my backyard" issue, which might limit its adoption. Another problem might be sysadmins that block domains which don't have these records, thus taking the power away from the sender's domain again.
While I'm rambling
While I'm ramblingly replying:
When an email comes in, you check if there's a verification server for the source domain of the email, and if so try connect to it, and then submit the email address for verification. [...] I know SMTP vrfy exists, but sites often turn it off
They turn it off because it can be abused by spammers looking for valid addresses or is in some other way a privacy concern. What you propose is functionally equivalent to VRFY (except that it can run on a different server), so I doubt it would be turned on either. However, it might not be a bad thing for servers to *try* to VRFY an address, and only block if VRFY returns "no such user" (not "permission denied"). If a separate protocol and server is desirable, there is always good old finger (though it's maybe a little too free-form), but VRFY makes more sense, as the primary mail servers should know to whom they can deliver mail.
Quote:
"According to Brightmail spokesperson Francois Lavaste, an unidentified Internet marketer overwhelmed Brightmail's filtering system with messages, slowing down all e-mail delivery."
Why not name and shame them?
If they used their own servers then you know who they are, and if they didnt (although the sheer volume means it is very unlikely they could have used an open-relay unnoticed) then trace them back and make an example of them.
They are clearly a professional operation so bad press is going to make them look really bad in front of their existing clients, and if you tried hard enough you could have great fun suing them for all they were worth...
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