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."

Comments

Spam to spammers

[razmaspaz]

Do you think the people who send out all this spam get annoyed at all the spam in their mailbox or are they proud of the work they do?

Is that why spam in my Hotmail account has dropped

[dustpuppy]

Hmmm ... i don't know if it cooincidence, but the spam in my Hotmail account has significantly dropped off ... from 30 to 100 spam a day down to 10-20 max ...

There ought to be a law...

[cperciva]

We really need a law which requires Internet service providers to publicly disclose their terms of service -- that is, publicly disclose what terms of service they actually enforce.

After all, it's really just a consumer protection issue: Verio claims to have an active abuse department, and is thereby misleading people who assume that spammers on Verio's network will be shut down.

Spammers

[Ninja Master Gara]

I've had to shut down two mail accounts because of the enormous volume of spam they get. Enough to make even using spam filters a bandwidth problem on my dial up. They were unfortunate enough to be linked with mailto: on a medium traffic site before the harvesting craze began and within a couple weeks were effectively unusable.

ISPs need to realise that if they're not going to do anything about it, they'll be blocked. This happened to us years ago when the ORDB started, and we fixed the problem immediately. We didn't think they were being nasty to us, we realised we had a problem, and we set about fixing it. When ISPs get globally klined from IRC networks, their customers want to know why, and put pressure on the ISP. They listen and respond.

This is no different. If yer gonna be a spammy host, prepare to be blacklisted. Reponsible, rigid, no nonsense, targetted policies are the only thing that will have ANY effect, and even they won't STOP all spam. But it sure helps.

Re:This is depressing...

[Ilgaz]

I don't believe a single word of you. Your URL, which is some sort of affilate ID makes me think different stuff than the thing you said.

What is "your site", if its "your site", you are CEO of Reozone.com? If thats true, do you affilate with them?

Let me tell the real story. You had some sort of an innocent mailing list, than you sent that reozone.com URL with your affilate link to them.

Oh blocking Yahoo.com? gmx.de blocks them, Novell Myrealbox blocks their mailing list service because of non-serious abuse policy (even they are a potential huge customer). Also, when a yahoo mail user spams you, I have a record like, 2 hours later his account has been deleted.

SO EVERYONE CLICKS ON YOUR REFERER ID'ED URL ON SLASHDOT GIVES YOU MONEY?

bleh

About theft of service

[coolgeek]

I'll probably get tagged as a troll for this one, but...

I support and believe the position that spammers or other unauthorized users of a system that I own are stealing services from me. I further believe it is OK to block their traffic from crossing my equipment.

Now, let's look at this from the telemarketing perspective...My phone at home is one of those models that has a wall wart. I believe when the phone rings, or is in use, it draws more current. So, when a telemarketer makes an unsolicited (and unauthorized) call to my phone, does that mean they're stealing my electricity? What about my most valuable resource, my time? Are they stealing my time?

I hate spam just as much as the next guy. And I don't believe ignoring people who cause a nuisance infringes their right to free speech. I do however believe the "telemarketing" lens will be used by the Judicial System when examining these issues. Sooner or later, these spammers will mount a constitutional challenge to anti-spam legislation. Well, if they are making that much money, anyway. They may not even need the money for such a battle, it seems the EFF just might take up their cause.

Re:Hrm, isn't that John Gilmore's ISP?

[billstewart]

Actually, you've hit a major irony, because Verio refuses to continue selling John Gilmore internet access. John was one of the members of The Little Garden internet access co-op (back before ISPs were common), which was businessified, then bought by Best, which was bought by Verio, which was bought by NTT.

But they will sell to spammers.

HE.net included? Surprised!

[markwelch]

I was also surprised to see he.net included in a blocklist. I hosted with them for a year (until moving my server home to my DSL connection due to budget constraints) because they have consistently had one of the strongest anti-spam responses, dating back to the "Joes.com/Yuri Rutman/thinning hair/el cheepo" forged-spam attack.

I do know that one of their employees handling spam complaints did give me a reason to pause once -- she initially accepted a spammer's response, but that action was reversed as soon as I challenged it, and the customer was terminated, and I was sent an apology making clear that this was a mistake, not a new spam-tolerant policy at the company. Later complaints were promptly and properly handled.

I believe that at least three he.net customers were terminated in the past year due to complaints I submitted. (And I was a lowly $200-per-month colo customer, and at least one of the terminated customers was much bigger.)

If he.net is leaving the door open to spam-cartels, despite warnings, then of course they should be blacklisted. I just find that harder to believe. In contrast, my experience has been than Verio is extremely spam-tolerant, even balking at terminating Spamford Wallace (they finally relented and cut him off, which resulted in his filing a frivolous lawsuit against me, costing me $5,000 to get the suit dismissed). All my more recent spam complaints to Verio have gone unanswered, and I know I have several Verio IP blocks already on my filter list, though I haven't blocked all their IP addresses.