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ISPs That Actively Combat SPAM?
The Llama King asks: "Like a good netizen, I do my part to report spam. But most Internet providers merely respond with a canned e-mail and it's hard to tell whether action was taken - or when. I know a lot of abuse desks are overwhelmed and spammers can get a free ride if they pick their targets carefully. Occasionally I'll get a personalized response, and even notification that a spammer's access and/or Web site has been nuked - but that's rare, and seems to be getting rarer. What ISPs are best at responding to spam complaints in a timely fashion, both in terms of killing e-mail accounts and shutting down sites that have been spamvertised?"
But complaining about spam is like pissing on a forest fire. I've accepted reality and now I just filter it with Spam Probe. The only way spam will stop is with a law and hefty fines.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The failure rate of spam filters is still 1 to 5%. This is a fairly large ammount of email if you count how many of these are transfered each day. I don't want any of my personal emails being blocked as spam because that friend of mine used a phrase like "I got that job which pays me really good".
What we need is
- better laws concerning internet privacy
- shutting down of spamming machines
- getting these spammers understand somehow how much we appreciate their spam and at what extent we read it. That will make them less interested in spam.
My personal experience is that IOCom is one of the best in responding to/nuking abusive accounts. They are also very heavy into protecting a customer's privacy (so be prepared to prove abuse, not just random accusations). I have been with them for about 7 years now. I was with them when they were still a BBS that offerred internet access. For a good read into WHY they protect customer's privacy read here.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
It hasn't happened in a while, but any time I got a complaint about a customer spamming that checked out, I cut off the account immediately. This was happening about once a month for a while -- people signing up for throwaway accounts and spamming the hell out of them until they were cut off. One morning I checked my email and found spam that was sent from one of these accounts. I was able to log in, lock the account and kick 'em off our modems. That made me feel good.
As for responses to complaints: we'd get a lot of complaints when one of these episodes happened (usually through the good offices of SpamCop, who Truly Rock), and it was impossible to reply individually to each one. I took the initiative and installed Linux (had been W98) so that I could use Mutt, with all the automation that implied, to send canned responses to let people know that someone's listening.
There are two big reasons for any ISP to respond aggressively to complaints about spam:
First, it's death to end up on a blacklist. The number of complaints would be astronomical, and if you're not lucky enough to be dealing w/a blacklist with defined ways of getting off it, you're stuck either waiting for people to decide you're honest/have suffered enough, or living with random chunks of email bouncing. Have a look in news.admin.net-abuse.email (I think that's the right group -- check Google) sometime and read the complaints from people who have been blacklisted. There is no sympathy (or at least very little) in that group for anyone who is blacklisted (whether there should be sympathy is another question).
Second, and arguably more importantly, spam is just plain wrong. There were the comments of the head of an old ISP -- The Well, maybe? -- a while back; he said that for any other entity on the Internet, a DDOS on the scale of spam would be Big News and would result in action. But email, for some reason, just doesn't rate a damn. People are drowning in the stuff, but so are mail servers, and the ISPs that run them, and the admins who take care of them. Check out my journal -- we had to spend $ on getting a new server, plus my time to set it up, just to keep our customer-facing mail server from falling over from the sheer volume of the stuff. That's fucking insane, and the idea of contributing in any degree to someone else's version of that story should make anyone sick to their stomach. It is such a waste of so many resources.
So for me at least, the moral and economic incentives to take action on spam are huge, but the volume of complaints for any episode usually prevents me from replying personally. I can only imagine what it would be like for someone at AOL or Sprint or what have you. YMMV.
Carousel is a lie!
Why not start off with whitelisting? Add some extension to SMTP that would sign outgoing mail with a domain certificate. Old, noncompliant software could ignore the extension. Newer versions could verify the signature and bypass the spam (message content) filters, but check the domain name against a domain blacklist. Once a domain was found to be a source of spam, it could be added to a domain blacklist (or better yet, request that they get put on the CRL!). Eventually, you'd get to the point where you (the mail server admin) would feel comfortable requiring all domains to sign their mail to you.
How about it, guys? (I looked, and this was the closest thing I could find.)
Second notice offending ISPs include:
I generally block China attacks without sending a notice (because there's no whois information for who to complain to - and abuse@ often bounces). This has proven to kill a LOT of SPAM. The spam houses that proxy off of Chinese servers can't scan my site for addresses, and the SPAM mail servers won't get through. I don't even bother filtering mail on that server as blocking formmail scanners' domains pretty much kills 90% of them.