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As the Spam Turns
Anonymous writes "The SBL has added Verio's corporate mail servers
to its blocklist which protects nearly 100 million mailboxes, because of the number of spam gangs on the Verio network.
Verio also provides connectivity to AS26212, a collection of 9 of the most notorious spammers netblocks. AS26212 - the new spambone? - is also connected to he.net and bbnplanet.net."
Nobody's stopping you from getting spam if you want it. Calling this censorship is completely and utterly misunderstanding what censorship is, and what a blocklist is.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
I'm in the process of selecting a new hosting provider, and I've been fishing the Verio account team's emails out of my quarantine folder since the first of November. I just love responding to them with the Spam Assassin body modifications right there in-line -- of course, they haven't commented.
Needless to say, the chances of my actually recommending them as a hosting provider are roughly equivalent to the odds of a squadron of flying pink poodles attacking Finland on December 32nd.
Really? You mean blocking 995 out of 1000 isn't "nearly perfect"? 99.5% seems pretty damn close to perfect to me...
--sdem
This isn't so much censorship as it is removing a source of unwanted, unsolicited mass mailings. In many states, this is illegal, especially when it comes to telephones. I personally really like the fact that this might possibly remove a source of spam from being able to deliver to my email account.
Besides, if they decide to take the initiative and prevent this sort of thing from happening, they can be reinstated. Sounds good to me.
In the comment from Spamhaus it is clearly stated that only the Verio corporate mailserver is blocked in order to protect their ISP users.
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
A while ago I worked for a now defunct dot-com that dealt in e-mail marketing through opt-ins. When we moved to hosting through verio. They threatened to cut us off even though our mailings were opt-in, and sent from a different (non-verio) location.
Their anti-spam policies were so draconian that we had to move to exodus. When did they become pro-spam?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
More legislation? More bullcrap solutions like Spamcop.net? Hell no. We need to go the way of the Distributed Checksum Clearhouse and Brightmail. The moment we (as a network of companies and admins running SMTPs and MTAs) detect spam being received, we report the full headers and decide if we wish to actively block, filter, tag, etc.
And, as ISPs, we simply have to monitor our resources more carefully. If we detect a lot of broadcast activity (i.e. outbound SMTP traffic) we're notified and we investigate. We collaborate.
Real technology can block spam. Laws and crap like Spamcop just make more red tape and are half ass solutions.
They have IP addresses in their MX records. This is against RFC.
0 8/ msg00150.html
from a dig mx ixxnet.net:
ANSWER SECTION:
ixxnet.net. 1H IN MX 5 mail.ixxnet.net.
ixxnet.net. 1H IN MX 4 66.25.224.10.
And from a dig mx dialnil.com:
ANSWER SECTION:
dialnil.com. 59m51s IN MX 4 216.21.32.14.
dialnil.com. 59m51s IN MX 5 mail.dialnil.com.
RFC 1035 - "Each MX matches a domain name with two pieces of data, a preference value (an unsigned 16-bit integer), and the name of a host."
http://www.isc.org/ml-archives/bind-users/1999/
Actually, most "spam blockers" work for organizations which commercially use the Internet. They are mail administrators for ISPs or other companies, which have directed them to reduce the impact of spam on their businesses -- to cut costs or to improve service to customers.
Spam isn't commercial use. It's criminal use.
Sure, DNSBLs and other blacklists help. They should be used. The content filtering is just perfect for covering that last mile (if spam passes all the blacklisting mechanism). It _might_ deterr spammers from spamming, but I doubt it. Spammer notices that his last mailing bounced, and he uses another open relay.
If a spammer knows that Bayesian filters and Spamassassin/Razor type content filtering are widely deployed, it will act as a quite effective deterrant for sending spam. Maybe.
What really needs to be done is EDUCATE isps that an open relay can get you in a whole heap of trouble. Of course many have closed their relays, but a lot still have open ones. Especially administrators in the Middle East and Asia need to be LARTed badly, since that's where 90% of my spam is relayed from. Once all open relays are killed, the spammer has only 2 alternatives, either set up his own SMTP, or use the one his ISP allocated to him. Both are easy to track and put an end to. The spammer would have to register for a new account and the more often that happens, the sooner his/her name will be blacklisted. Heck, if anti-spam laws are legislated, the spammer could end up in jail. Jail is the ultimate deterrent. There's nothing like the prospect of being assraped by Bubba to deterr spammers.
With respect to the "filtering spam is censorship" comments, well... Content filtering is my way of plugging my ears with my fingers because I do not want to know what you are trying to sell me/scam me into. The DNSBLs are a LART to teach the admins not to run an open relay.
I find that figure *very* hard to believe. How do they figure it's 100M?
Here's hoping this group is more responsible than SPEWS. With that (likely bogus) figure being announced, I doubt that they are.
Exactly. We get users bitching and moaning about spam, and what are we going to do -- ignore them and let them take their business elsewhere? We are taking the route of designing a crap filter the users can configure, and select which BL's to use -- all based around procmail and SpamAssassin. User doesn't want any filtering? Okay, easy enough for them to disable it completely.
I don't want to sound like a callous jerk, but it doesn't sound like the original poster knows what it's like having thousands of users screaming for some sort of server-side spam filtering. For their $18 or whatever a month, the majority of them want their ISP to do something about the viagra/pr0n/MMF spam in their mailbox. ISP's just need to make the right decision in letting the users decide if they want filtering or not. Users can always go elsewhere if the ISP wants to enforce filters the user doesn't like.
My $.02 USD.
TMDA offers those who want it the ability to filter e-mail through a confirmation process (or, you can generate "keyword" or "dated" addresses for temporary use in newsgroups and other high-harvester areas). My spam went from several tens of spam messages a day to zero after spending a couple of hours with TMDA.
This solution doesn't do anything about bandwidth (since you will still get the same amount of spam traffic at your mail port), but it's a fuzzy-warm feeling to be in control of your own mailbox for once.
You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address
Actually, having just tried a demo of CD-R Diagnostic (an excellent program, btw), I'd like to point out that you send FOUR. Two in quick succession when the demo is downloaded, one three days later, and one five days after that.
The last e-mail says that you delete all evaluation e-mail addresses after 14 days, but the others give no indication of when it will end, there are no remove instructions, there is no explanation of how you got my address, etc. If I got this because someone typed in my e-mail address, I'd probably report you too. You should read up on the Ten Rules for Permission-Based Marketing.
Rich Kyanka, one of the Something Awful gang, pulled a hilarious series of pranks on the Nigerian money launderers. Some of their other pranks on spammers (scroll down to email section) are pretty damn funny as well.
This works best if you own your own domain name and can create multiple pop boxes. It's still doable using regular email accounts, however.
Step 1: Change your email address to a previously unused address at your domain. Test it for a day, verify no spam is coming in to that address.
Step 2: Email all your trusted friends, relatives and business contacts your new email address.
Step 3: Remove your old email address links from your website and replace them with a feedback form that emails an unrevealed throwaway secondary address using your favorite web -> email gateway scripts.
Step 4: Create a bounce message at your old address, with a link to the feedback form, for all the people you forgot to email about your new address, and for people who want to contact you through your old address as they have found it on google searches or other archived postings, or your old business cards, etc.
Step 5: Receive both the new email address and the feedback form submissions on to your local mail reader. Filter them in to seperate directories. Give out your real, private address to feedback form users once they've verified themselves as being legit. If not, have a throwaway identity you can talk to them through. (the email account that the feedback form mails to) If you start getting spam at that address, simply change it.
Step 6: When you make public postings, post the feedback form URL instead of your email address. When you have to give your address away to commercial websites to sign up or download things, give them the throwaway address, or create a third address for legitimate online companies and filter that into a third folder for "commercial website email" If that get compromised by an unscrupulous business, change it. Still doesn't affect your primary private address.
You can receive the two or three addresses all at once with any modern mail reader, and filter them into folders. I personally use Eudora.
This is a really easy thing to do if you can stand changing your email address. I've had the same address since 1995, so I get about 150 spams per day. I have a filter that gets rid of most of those, but that's local and I still take the bandwidth hit, and about 20% of them get to my inbox still. Rather than try to over-filter and get a false positive, I think the above solution is a worry free and clean way to make a break from spam.
---Mike
Hotmail just started using Brightmail, hence the drop in spam. It's nothing to do with blocklists or Verio.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
100M users protected by SBL, how much users are blocked by SPEWS? Hands up! Me!
I'm not sure from reading your message if you are aware the FROM address on spam is always faked.
Blocking AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc may be a cheap way to stop a lot of spam, but that is not where the spam is actually coming from.
Sorry in advance if this is redundant. I know
.jp friends as well.
it's a bit lame filtering spam with spamassassin
after having downloaded it, but if you don't
have any other valid option, this would be
good as well.
Verio is listed on blackholes.us, which make it us easier to set it up on
spamassassin
For instructions click here:
http://www.blackholes.us/docs/usage.html
I already use it with china.blackholes.us, nigeria.blackholes.us and korea.blackholes.us, and
I must say I'm very happy of this setup, even if
idiots like "merrynhappy" still are out from
the filters. Notice that I don't filter all the
foreign encodings, since I want to allow my
Ciao.
More than that. Verio could (and, possibly, already has) experience widespread blocking of their IP ranges by individual SysAdmins in privately-run (read: local and site-specific) blocklists, if they're dumb enough to throw cartooneys at Spamhaus.
In fact, they already tried the same stunt on Ron Guilmette of monkeys.com (threatened legal action when Ron expanded their listings on his system). Within (probably) minutes of the word going out on the newsgroup, many SA's, myself included, started asking for lists of Verio's IP ranges, and inserted those lists in their private blocklists.
In short: If they threaten legal action against people who are doing nothing more than expressing an opinion (in the form of publishing lists of IP addresses they think are contributing to the spam problem), and taking steps to protect their private property (by checking incoming mail connections against that same list, and selectively blocking the unwanted stuff), they're only going to dig themselves deeper into their existing hole.
Verio is second only to UUNet (also known as 'SpewSpewNet') for harboring spammers. They need a wake-up call like nobody's business. If Steve's listing doesn't do the trick, I don't think anything else will.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies