AOL Blocks Telstra Bigpond Mail

frodmann writes "Australian IT reports here that AOL has been blocking email from Telstra bigpond mail accounts. This is possibly attributed to AOL's new white list policy as reported earlier on Slashdot. Although this article is a few days old I can verify that this is still happening. (For those outside of Australia, Telstra is one of our largest ISPs.)"

Comments

And in other news...

[lewko]

Australian ISPs block all mail from AOL, and NO ONE cares!

Re:And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. Who cares about AOL lusers!

Re:And in other news...

[BrokenHalo]

That was modded funny, but it's true...

AOL might be chagrined to learn how little most Australians would care about their block. I've been blocking all AOL mail since 1998 on a whitelist basis. (I'm not with Large Puddle.) Guess how many AOL-ers have made it on to that whitelist?

None. Not one.

Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Typically the service offered from Tesltra is Australia is terrible, but due to lack of competition in Australia they have been able to get away with shoddy service and gerneral non-compliance for years.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[k-0s]

Typically the service offered from Tesltra is Australia is terrible, but due to lack of competition in Australia they have been able to get away with shoddy service and gerneral non-compliance for years.

So you're basically saying that Telstra BigPond is the Australian version of AOL then? Maybe thats why AOL is blocking them, their customer service is worse the AOLs and AOL prides itself at being the worst at customer service.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[rf0]

Are they like the UK where tesltra control the last mile and as such other ISP have to use it or are just there no other broadband ISP's? However in the UK the telco (BT) is moderated by Oftel which sort of keeps them in check.

Rus

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[dicka_j]

No, unfortunately we have AOL as well, and MSN.

Actually we have no good broardband providers at all. I wonder when these people are going to realise that the geek market is going to be a hell of a lot larger than the "household-mother" market, which most advertising is currently aimed at.

Service is usually limited to amounts less than a gig or two a month, with either huge rate increases or severe speed caps after that amount has been exceeded.

Broadband in australia is going to take a while to be adopted....

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Telstra was the government owned telco in Australia. They have been partly privitised and other telcos have been introduced to the market. Unfortunately Telstra still owns all of the major telecommunications infrastructure in Australia so there is almost no way for consumers or other telcos to avoid them.

Optus (the second largest telco, now owned by Singtel) started to do a roll out of cable in the metro areas but it was unfeasable.

Telstra still think like a government owned monopoly who couldn't care less about customers, or other companies it has to deal with.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Show me where to sign up for MSN dial up/broadband. Oh, wait, you can't! That must be because you are talking crap!

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[drsmithy]

Actually we have no good broardband providers at all. I wonder when these people are going to realise that the geek market is going to be a hell of a lot larger than the "household-mother" market, which most advertising is currently aimed at.

You really are kidding yourself if you think this. There's a reason why Telstra and Optus got away easily with their 3G/month "standard plan" - because 95% of the people using it don't need any more (and probably rarely get closing to using their 3 gigs).

In any event, there's no shortage of providers selling large and unlimited services. Even more if you're prepared to pay a bit for it.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Tink2000]

Momma said never feed the trolls...

But oh well.

Anyway, typing www.msn.com.au turned me eventually to this link which clearly offers broadband MSN in .au. Prices start at $49.95/mo in .au dollars, I suppose.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[jmccay]

Actually, it more likely that someone from Tesltra sent spam mail to SEVERAL of AOL's users and those users REPORTED THE EMAIL(S) as spam and had them blocked. AOL has given it's users easier ways to report and block spam.
If AOL is blocking email from them, it's probably because someone their is sending spam. Perhaps even the original submitter was an Australian spammer. Did anybody consider that some of these people who submitted these stories may be sending unsolocited emails?

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Telstra is crap but they are far from a monopoly. I'm amazed that you could even work out how to reply to this post. Even AOL are Internet Service Providers within Australia, along with iPrimus, Optus, TPG, Ozemail, Pacific, Comcen, etc. along with another 80 smaller providers.

When I first connected to the net with my state of the art 28.8k modem around 1994 (through MagnaData) the only other big company at the time was Ozemail, and Telstra didn't even know what the Internet was, so I ask, at what point did Telstra become a monopoly?

As for Telstra's mail being blocked by AOL, how can you tell they it's actually AOL's fault? Telstra may not be a monopoly, but they certainly would like to be, since they had 90 years experience at being the only Australian telephone provider.

Most Telstra user wouldn't know how to use webmail since providers like hotmail do not provide telephone support to guide them through every step. That's the real problem. People like you who have no idea!

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Ramadog]

I followed the link and ended up at iprimus That $49.95 seems to be for a 355 meg download quota a month with any excess charged at 15.c a meg.

I am with a different ISP in Australia. That is more than what I am paying for my dialup with no quota.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Tink2000]

Oh yeah, I agree it's totally not fair that you guys down under have to put up with what I take for granted (that is, my biggest gripe about broadband being that people don't share files but are happy to leech off me at insane speeds ... but that's a different rant...). The Parent to my post was saying that there was no MSN broadband in .au. Now granted, iprimus is probably just using the MSN name and paying a fee to MS to get people on board, but nonetheless, there is indeed MSN broadband down under.

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No good Broadband providers? Obviously you've never heard of iiNet

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[dbglt]

So you're basically saying that Telstra BigPond is the Australian version of AOL then? Maybe thats why AOL is blocking them, their customer service is worse the AOLs and AOL prides itself at being the worst at customer service.

No, Telstra BigPond is nothing like AOL. Telstra is simply an overpriced, mainstream isp. They are half (somewhere around there) owned by the government. DO NOT buy services from them - for many years they have had a monopoly on Australian internet services and their prices are outrageous and even laughable.

But don't worry. AOL is also in Australia. They have just launched a new broadband initiative that looks like it was designed by a mentally disabled 12 year old. We are now being bombarded with ads meant for that 12 year olds peers, for the 'new' services available. Pleeasse... how long has broadband been available around the world...

And please, one/two/three gigabyte caps are old news. Try whirlpool.net.au for more info - I have seen unlimited 256k for 69.95$ a month. This is still rather behind in terms of other countries - but good for the Australian standards.

The small isp's have been screwed over for years in Australia, but it is now coming to an end. Many have joined alliances - and soon - reliable & affordable internet (above 56k :) will be available for the Aussies!

Be Afraid, ery Afraid :)

Re:Telstra BigPond is crap!!!

[wraithgar]

It does Telstra no good when AOL users report spam to AOL... because AOL doesn't forward the abuse complaint to the end-ISP unless that ISP has called AOL and set up a "feedback loop" to explicitly request copies of abuse compaints.

It's a crappy policy that assures that AOL will continue to arbitrarily (From the ISPs point of view) block whole ISPs without any real recourse (other than customers cancelling to to to AOL to E-mail their friends).

Blocking spam is good...

[WegianWarrior]

..but this sort of action is a hurting inocent third part (ie; the other, legitimate users of mailservers in question).

It would be like stopping to deliver snailmail from another city / nation, just because someone living there sends junkmail to your city / nation. Is this something we want?

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[Ieshan]

I can't figure out why AOL doesn't stop developing new useless content and start developing email filters that really work. They have the largest collection of junk-mail EVER to run statistical analysis on. If all they can come up with is "block mail from X server", they suck. =P

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[www.sorehands.com]

It would be like stopping to deliver snailmail from another city / nation, just because someone living there sends junkmail to your city / nation.

No. It is the stopping mail from a city where are 100 people sending 60,000 envelopes with anthrax in it.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[rf0]

There once was a extreme case of blocking where a US company recived on piece of spam from a .uk. As such they blocked the entire country. It was only when they realised they also owned a .co.uk domain they decided to unblock it as staff couldn't email each other

Rus

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[WegianWarrior]

Bad as spam is, it is no where as bad as a contagious disease. Espesially not as bad as a deadly, contagnious disease. It's electronic junkmail, no more, no less.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[York the Mysterious]

Just a quick question. Not a troll, but a comparison of real work tactics that are similar. Is everyone in Syria or Cuba bad? Does everyone support communism or harbor terrorist cells? So why does everyone get an embargo against them? It's the same thing. It forces the government (ISP) to clean up their act by affecting their citizens (users). Maybe Telstra will start policing their users better to prevent spamming? Who knows.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[ozbon]

Now that's hardly a news-flash, is it? After all, people have known that AOL sucks right back to when dinosaurs roamed the land.

All those little cavepaintings of pissed-off men waggling spears about? They weren't hunters, they were users of the first AOL system.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[ozbon]

Yeah, maybe Telstra will start policing their users better. I'd rather see AOL do the same though - a good half of my spam still comes from AOL addresses.

I believe there's an expression about "cleaning your own house before complaining about the state of other peoples" - but it can all be shortened to the pithy-but-accurate "fucking hypocrites"

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[gonz]

E-mail is an outdated system, and spam is only one symptom of a larger condition which includes forged headers, open relays, viruses, etc. These are not social problems, they are technical ones.

More sophisticated spam filters are NOT the answer! More legislation is NOT the answer!

The solution to spam is a technical one, involving distributed validation of digital certificates. If you think about it, this could be done while still preserving people's privacy, but it would require a few extensions to SMTP. It would also require a little self-regulation by the administrators (similar to relay blacklists). This is not a new idea; it's been suggested many times.

The problem is adoption. It's the same chicken-and-egg problem seen with many other great technologies. For example, I installed PGP once, but it was useless because nobody I know uses it (and most people haven't even heard of it).

So here's my point: Huge providers like Hotmail, AOL, Telstra, etc. are in a unique position to improve the situation. They have the power to solve the chicken-and-egg problem. If a just few of them implemented these superior technologies, the rest of the world would be encouraged to follow. PGP is a great start, but cryptographic sender validation would be even better. It would eliminate the problems of address forgery and spam more effectively than any lawsuit or heuristic or FBI raid.

-Gonz

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[CoreDump01]

I'd rather see AOL do the same though - a good half of my spam still comes from AOL addresses.

*sigh* No they don't come from AOL, its almost impossible to spam from an AOL account since the AOL OPs are on the lookout 27/7.

The "From:" header is faked, thats all. (It's alway good to have a *valid* From: FQDN since most ISPs don't accept mail from hosts which do not resolve, so the SPAM gets bounced)

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[mark2003]

Much as I think it looks like Telstra needs a swift kick in the b**locks to force it to sort it's security/spam issues out, I'm not sure that AOL is doing this just to block spam and make it's users' lives easier.

Being cynical I might see this as just another slightly shady business practice in order to gain competitive advantage - AOL might not own the internet but it always seems to act as though it does.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[Anonymous Coward]

With regards to the FQDN, you've confused the From header with the "mail from" in the SMTP envelope.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[@madeus]

It would be like stopping to deliver snailmail from another city / nation, just because someone living there sends junkmail to your city / nation. Is this something we want?

While I don't think it's something we want in an ideal world, it's actually something quite a few people do already.

A lot of email coming from the APNIC area, particularly Taiwan, Vietnam & Korea (etc.), is filtered completely by quite a number of admins, simply because of the ownership information on the originating IP addresses. The number of poorly managed exploitable sendmail systems (particularly ones owned by universities/educational establishments) in this region of the world is stunning.

I remember there was one women only university in Vietnam (IIRC), that had a mail server that was open as a full anonymous SMTP relay for a year, the site also had no postmaster or abuse address. Sadly, this is not uncommon in areas of the world that don't have adequate numbers of suitably experienced/skilled staff.

It's not just APNIC areas that are sources of Spam of course, there is quite a bit from South America, and from Africa (which I think will be the next biggest source in the years to come, as the network infrastructure increases while general poverty and the desperate need to make a living remain). There are even a couple of companies in Spain and France that are also major sources of Spam, due to utter incompetence and inadequate AUP enforcement by up streams and peers.

This is all unfortunate, but with AOL filtering 780 million spam messages a day (which is ~100 million more than they deliver) it's really necessary, the only other immediately available alternative for ISP's being to use additional more advanced - and more expensive - filtering methods (such as Brightmail) and pass those costs on to the consumer, and a lot of customers would sooner they went for the cheap, quick and dirty approach.

So in short, yes this is what we want.

It's not just a case of 'one person in a city sending us mail we don't want' it's a case of 'thousands of people in a country sending us mail we don't want' - and /we/ have to pay postage.

While the costs are smaller, the charges still add up - and if, like me, you have a roaming GPRS or 3G service a single spam can cost the same to receive as it costs to post a 1st class letter (as these services are typically billed by the kilobyte, and have quite high charges).

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[@madeus]

AOL block 780 Million messages a day. This is 100 Million messages more than are actually delivered.

AOL spam filtering is a LOT more complex than 'block mail from X server', and it's good at it's job - but like any system it's not infallible.

As many providers have found out, if you make it *really* effective, it starts getting false positives and that irritates some customers far more. As an example, Apple's .mac mail used to be _really_ good at filtering mail, but some users complained and they loosed up Brightmail it seems - and now it's noticeably less effective.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[blowdart]

Pizza deliveries don't go to the bad part of town, nor do taxis.

Consider this, a town next to your house sends frequent visitors. 99% of these visitors vandalise your town, break windows and steal. How do you stop your house being abused? Banning all people from that town is reasonable. If you do know someone there you can always give them permission on an individual basis.

Telstra are well known for not acting on abuse reports, not caring about open proxies, hosting a lot of spammers, including Dean Westbury and generally not playing nice. I'm more than happy to block Telstra on my mail server. I've never seen a legit email from them yet.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[wik]

> As many providers have found out, if you make it *really* effective, it starts getting false positives and that irritates some customers far more.

And completely blocking an ISP doesn't get false positives? :-) At some point, it becomes a self denial of service.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[DrXym]

They have something called AOL Communicator which could do the job. It's a standalone mail client, much like OE or Moz mail which contains bayesian spam filtering capabilities, filters, folders and more.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[TKinias]

scripsit blowdart:

Consider this, a town next to your house sends frequent visitors. 99% of these visitors vandalise your town, break windows and steal. How do you stop your house being abused? Banning all people from that town is reasonable.

Sounds like English football fans. Didn't they get England banned a while back?

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[ozbon]

Agreed - I know that the headers are faked. However, isn't this just the same as "passing off" one company name that trades on the name of another? At that point, if AOL were to digit extractum then their lawyers would start sueing the spammers for passing off and blah blah blah.

Re:Blocking spam is good...

[Anonymous Coward]

Their spam blocking system is just great. I know because I work for a real ISP that has many legit customers. One day my boss got sick of adding IP addresses to our mail server and just opened it up for everyone to relay. AOL let it go for weeks sending spam before they started blocking. While they were waiting for me to fix my relay it sent messages to the postmaster account letting me know what was wrong and how to fix it. And once it was fixed I was off the blacklist in 24 hours. If AOL says Telstra is bad enough to block, I believe it.

That's logical!

[Corporate Troll]

I mean, it is well known that Australia is a haven for Spammers. My mailbox is full of "enlarge your crocodile" and "hot young koala's" and of course the classic "kangooroo's herbal viagra".

I mean I'm glad that the internet (AOL is the internet, right?), finally did something against these annoying aussies!

Re:That's logical!

[trats]

I mean, it is well known that Australia is a haven for Spammers.

No it isn't. Australian email address receive far less spam than US ones. And then there's that supposed Government backed anti-spam legislation coming in.

And no, my mailbox is not full of "enlarge your crocodile" messages...

Re:That's logical!

[Orthanc_duo]

And to the mod of the above post...

That was funny (OK I'm a Kiwi so I'm biased)
but it is not a troll..

Re:That's logical!

[Corporate Troll]

Modding me "Troll" is always fair, considering my slashdot username. I had the strange idea of useing the username "Corporate Troll" without actually being a real troll.
The price I pay for that is the occasional "Troll" mod when I try to be funny. I don't mind, and take it with dignity.

Re:That's logical!

[Corporate Troll]

Here's an Australian Dollar and go and buy yourself some humour.

Re:That's logical!

[mitsuhama]

What is he/she going to do with $1aud they are worth fuck all.

AOL is just going to strangle itself...

[Ieshan]

More and more, people are realizing that E-Mail and 'The Internet' are not services offered by AOL. They're realizing that AOL does not "own" the internet, and they're realizing that most companies don't pay AOL to host their content.

It's tough to explain to people what the internet is. AOL was a great simplification tool, in the "early days" of public access - you connect, and everything's set up for you.

Now, millions who use the internet do so from work, with their work providing the connection and their work providing their email address. What's going to happen when AOL customers get told that they can't communicate with the "outside" anymore? Easy - they shut off their AOL subscription, because it becomes meaningless. Instead of simplifying their lives, it starts hampering them.

I find it funny that AOL has adopted this policy, only because their market share has so dramatically decreaesd in the last few years. Sure, lots of people use AOL instant messenger, but if AOL starts charging for that, people will switch - I guarrentee it.

These millions of people using Kazaa, etc.? They all realize that AOL isn't providing that content. Blocking (whitelisting) email makes the fact that AOL doesn't provide the internet *extremely salient* to AOL customers: Which is, imho, a horrible, horrible business move.

America Online: So easy to overlook, no wonder it's gone bankrupt.

Re:AOL is just going to strangle itself...

[analog_line]

You bring up points, and while they're valid on their face, they don't actually apply to AOL.

AOL is doing this precisely because of customer demand. Not demand of the high end user, but the demand from parents and other ease-of-use types. The people that own most of the companies I do consulting for also will have me set up their home networks, and almost all of them subscribe to AOL, because they're the best of a bad bunch in effectively filtering porn spam before it gets to the e-mail box of their little kids' AOL screen name. That's the single biggest request I get, is looking for software that will stop their kids from getting porn spam e-mail.

They don't care about Kazaa (their kids probably do, but they're not paying for the connection). They don't care if AOL owns the Internet. They just want some kind of relatively safe way for their kids to have an e-mail address they can give to their friends and have grandma and the family e-mail without having to delete all the porn spam themselves, by hand, before letting their kids sit in front of the computer.

These are not luddites. They may be technophobes themselves, but they want their kids to learn this stuff. However, they realize that the Internet is NOT a happy go lucky friendly place. Smart parents don't let their kids play in the street, and letting your kids play on an unmonitored, unfiltered cable/DSL connection is pretty much the equivalent. Parents want a nice neighborhood. They WANT AOL to work right. Yeah, it sucks a lot, but in most of their minds, it's a lot better than the alternative, and they're probably right. These people don't have the time to learn all the technology and skills needed to filter the raw Internet on their own. Most of the time AOL does the job well enough for their needs, and that's why I tend to recommend it for them.

Whitelisting is the ONLY way AOL and anyone else, for that matter, is ever going to get a handle on the spam problem without chucking SMTP altogether. It may make things harder, and may mean I have to start moving my clients away from AOL if they can't e-mail their kids from work if AOL just permablocks their work mail servers for the gods know what reason, but the practice of whitelisting is a GOOD THING. I can only hope more and more people start following AOL's example. Trust is the ONLY commodity in information security, whether in encryption, perimeter defenses, or spam prevention. Allowing people whom you do not trust to message you with the same freedom as those you do trust means you're going to be getting a lot of crap you don't want.

What is the purpose?

[cdf12345]

I understand that spam is a problem for AOL. But I fail to see how preventing people from sending mail to AOL customers is a smart business move.

What do they hope to gain? Are they really going to save that much money by stopping some spam?

Or, more likely they will annoy non-customers and current customers which is a lot worse than spam.

It takes 5 minutes to lose a customer and a lifetime to win them back.

No wonder AOL/Time Warner is having such problems, with flawed logic like this, I wouldn't doubt AOL soon stops accepting any internet e-mail traffic.

Re:What is the purpose?

[leviramsey]

Yes, but the same also applies to Telstra. If you're a business in Australia and you're doing business with a company in the US that uses AOL for email (and many do), you're going to bitch and moan that you can't contact a client of yours or contact a supplier of yours. The object of your bitching and moaning will be Telstra.

Email blacklists serve one real purpose: to pressure ISPs to drop spammers. They accomplish this by making enough collateral damage that the customers of said ISP make noise.

Not surprising

[The Original Yama]

" For those outside of Australia, Telstra is one of our largest ISPs. "

Telstra is Australia's largest ISP.

I'm not particularly surprised that this happened, seeing as how Telstra was almost blocked from Usenet not long ago. Fortunately for Telstra users, it seems to be trying to do something about it.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not particularly surprised that this happened, seeing as how Telstra was almost blocked from Usenet not long ago. Fortunately for Telstra users, it seems to be trying to do something about it.

Their only observable action was to remove the abuse@bigpond.com complaints address. The sooner Telstra gets seriously LARTed, the better.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up to 5 :)

Blocking

[rf0]

While I applaud AOL for trying to stop spam, cuting off a large ISP is just a bit overkill. I mean there are better ways such as tagging email though of as spam and letting the end user deleting them if wanted and only dumping them only if you are sure its spam.

Some IP blocks are nothing but spam so they are fine to block but you shouldn't use a sledgehammer to crack a nut

Rus

Re:Blocking

[Anonymous Coward]

But wouldn't it be a better spam policy that stopped spam as early in the chain as possible? Assuming we can't stop individuals from sending spam, we could at least force major ISPs to deal more forcefully with customers who are spamming. I'm no AOL fan either, but why should they have to pay for bandwidth and filtering due to Australian spam? And why should end-users have to deal with it, and pay for it, too? Why not "encourage" the originating ISP do deal with it much earlier in the chain?

Compuserve, too

[IronBlade]

I know for a fact that CompuServe Pacific has also blocked Telstra Bigpond email.
For those not in the know, AOL owns CompuServe, and I suspect they use the same anti-spam filters.
A close friend works on the CompuServe Pacific tech-support line and has been flat out answering complaining users about this problem.
Let's hope it gets cleared up soon!

Re:Compuserve, too

[YrWrstNtmr]

Actually, it's not even a case of "AOL owns CompuServe", but rather AOL bought Compuserve, and now they are one and the same. Even down to calling the same modem pool, (yes, the AOL and CS phone numbers for a particular locality are the same, and sharing the same individual account information. If a user has both an AOL acct and a CS acct, he cannot use both at the same time, even from different PC's and different sub screennames.

All that is different is a somewhat different GUI. CS has basically ceased to exist as a unique product.

Why is this a Troll?

[Michael's a Jerk!]

I'm Australian, and this comment hits the nail right on the head. Telstra is a govenment approved monopoly - they can and do get away with anything.

We have tiny amounts of bandwidth given to us - nevermind more bandwidth costs them almost nothing. A typical plan is one gigabyte a month. I cry when I here people from other countires casually mentioning they downloaded a few .ISO's.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[munro]

Maybe it costs you more because of the
asymmetric nature of internet interconnection. Telstra probably has much higher expenses than ISPs in the US and Europe.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why can other ISP's offer 65Gb per month for the same price that telstra offers 1 Gb ??

answer me that!!

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[p00ya]

I think saying that Telstra is a government approved monopoly is a bit harsh. Apart from the whole existence of the ACCC (for what it's worth), the monopolistic state of Telstra atm isn't really approved by the government so much as tolerated (what are they going to do about it that would be in both the shareholders and the people of Australia's interests). After all, its been better since the telco industry was opened up (remember when telecom australia was a true state monopoly?).

Personally I'm in favour of having all the infrastructure retained by the government (and thus the people of Australia). Whether the overlying services get further privatised or not I'm fairly apathetic to. It could go either way in terms of competition.

Obtw, I don't think the 1GB per month is a 'typical' plan for the broadband sector (other ISPs included). If you're on a network with free WAIX (most non-Telstra ISPs), then you can d/l all 7 debian cds, and all the M$ updates for free ;). Hardly anyone i know has Telstra ADSL; most are with a WAIX network. On-peak/non-WAIX caps are set at 3 Gb for most of my friends' ADSL plans.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[CooCooCaChoo]

Well, you can thank the senate for no giving signals that will sell off the other half of telstra. In New Zealand we sold of Telecom and ever since then, the price of services have been dropping and quality increasing.

Well, hopefully John Howard will go for a double disolution and that he can get a majority in both the senate and parliament.

This reminds me of the GST debate and the rubbish the likes of the Democrats, Greens and Labour tried to push out to make the so-called case. If it weren't for them, Australia would have had a deeper tax cut. Maybe it is about time Australia just got rid of the senate altogether.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[sco08y]

By gov't approved you mean "gov't enforced."

'net access is hardly a natural monopoly.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[evil_roy]

Wrong. It is not a bit harsh - it is a massive understatemenmt to say that Telstra is a government approved monopoly. It is a government OWNED monolopoly. Then see who has their claws in deepest for the 49% that has been sold off - media monolpolies that our government drops their strides for every time they are asked.

I'm also in favour of government retaining the infrastructure (ie the cables & exchanges or power grid) and charging whoever wants to pay for a licence access. This is not what has happened. The guts are sold lock,stock and barrel. In the case of Telstra this has not been allowed to happen for a few reasons, the main one being the decimation that would occur in the false free market that exists in Aussie telcos right now.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[oingoboingo]

Maybe it is about time Australia just got rid of the senate altogether.

Yes, because our House of Representatives is filled with such fine, upstanding, honest folks. Now excuse me while I use my anti-terrorism kit to wipe my arse.

The Senate may go through periods of stupidity, but fuck me...imagine Howard/Costello without some type of occasional choke being applied.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

>John Howard will go for a double disolution
The best solution would be a double decimation, ie shoot 2 out of each 10 whenever they fuckup. Soon
you have either capable/honest politicians or none.

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[Luguber123]

Ofcourse all telecompanies have higher expenses than income, thats why everybody should pay for atleast twice of what they are promised, then, if they beg, they should be given a quarter of what they were promised. It's all in the nature of telecom monopol. Which is why wireless makes me sleep a whole lot better at night, knowing that I'm getting it all for free from the company that used to have an unlimited bandwidth to my wallet.

How many pepole actually lives in Australia? a cable to Japan cannot be much of what you people pay in phone rates anyways?

Re:Why is this a Troll?

[drsmithy]

We have tiny amounts of bandwidth given to us - nevermind more bandwidth costs them almost nothing.

International traffic costs _shitloads_.

A typical plan is one gigabyte a month.

A typical cable plan is around 3G/month and most of those are holdovers from previous eras. there is no shortage of "unlimited" plans on the market now, both those that define "umlimited" as just "lots and lots" and those that really do mean "unlimited".

They Should Be Blocked

[Nom du Keyboard]

BigPond was most vulnerable to users running their own open relay mail servers via connections to the ISP

These days open relay mail servers are just plain irresponsible. Maybe 99% of the users are responsible people, but the remaining 1% are a plague on what is otherwise a wonderful achievement. We just can't afford these open relays and if it takes major ISP's like AOL to start blocking large swaths of them to end this, more power to them!

Re:They Should Be Blocked

[MechCow]

Yes but this is a story about telstra's main SMTP servers being blocked. I purposely do not send mail through my own server because I assume coming from Bigpond cable there is a chance the IP block will be blacklisted.

Then again who would want to email anyone on AOL anyway?

Re:They Should Be Blocked

[trifster]

Hey I agree. My ISP has blocks the port so I can't run my own MTA. Simple solution IMHO. I get to much email as it is and as a personal user of my ISP, the username@theirISPname.net is fine with me. I see two problems here though, the ignorant (unknowledgeable) user running an open relay by accident and the decietful person exploiting his ability to use open relays. But the bottom line if they want to spam they will find a way. I ultimately feel AOL's approach is not the best unless there is some info they aren't sharing on their reasoning.

Re:They Should Be Blocked

[minas-beede]

"We just can't afford these open relays and if it takes major ISP's like AOL to start blocking large swaths of them to end this, more power to them!"

Close enough. Years ago I had an open relay that was discovered. I would have considered it favor to have blocked it. Instead I cured the problem.
I cured it by making my open relay effectively filter spam. then I ASKED to be listed (by ORBS) - might as well let the spammers send relay spam to a black hole, eh?

Still works. jackpot.uk.net

It's really very easy. The spammers actually do need systems to abuse in order to send spam. They find the systems they can abuse very simply: they look for them. If a system looks like it can be abused the spammers send spam through it. If the operator of the system faked the appearance of vulnerability the spammer just wasted his time. If the spammer gives away anything about his operation (in the URLs, if nowhere else) the operator has ammunition for a complaint - a complaint the spammer's ISP really shouldn't ignore (it's an abuse complaint, a complaint of attempted theft of service.) If the operator is more current he could be running a fake open proxy instead of a fake open relay. Then he may have the spammer's IP (if the spammer didn't go through an open proxy to reach the fake open proxy.) Once again: powerful complaint material.

Good

[Mattygfunk1]

I hope this turns off a few of Telstra's clients. Despite being a majority government owned monopoly, people still sign up for their overpriced, under-performing network.

Have a quick look at whirlpool broadband news and the number of "telstra is down" stories and anti-telstra sentiment in the comments. Remind you of anywhere else ;)

__
cheap web site hosting from $3

Thanks for the update

[Anonymous Coward]

...be sure to tell us about it again, three days from now. ...not...

AOL seems a bit slow to me

[herbierobinson]

Telstra was terrible about policing spammers a year ago, but they seem to be getting better, now. Most of what I see is now coming from China and Brazil.

Speaking of China, what were the names of some of those subversive groups that all the Chinese spammers belong to? I know the Falun Gong is one, but what are the others?

An Alexandrian Solution...

[geekwench]

...to a Gordian problem, indeed.
Given that one out of every three spams that clogged up my Hotmail account for a while at least purported to be from BigPond, I can see the rationale behind the ban. However, I'm not happy with any ISP - especially AOL - deciding for me what e-mails I shall and shall not recieve. This is why I maintain my own set of filters.

Should BigPond tighten up the open relays, and go after offenders themselves? You betcha. Will they, especially after this? Hopefully. The solution to spam originating from BigPond (or anywhere else) should not involve the ISP playing Big Brother. Difficult as it might be to believe, BigPond (or Hotmail, or Yahoo) does have legitamate users who are innocent of broadcasting spam detailing how to enlarge body parts that you might not possess.

Re:An Alexandrian Solution...

[CausticWindow]

I don't think AOL users are computer literate enough to know about filters, or at least not to maintain them.

Re:An Alexandrian Solution...

[Wild Wizard]

Telstra already deals with open relays on its customers systems

Telstra scan their entire netblock everyday for open relays and if you foolisly run one you can expect your account to be disabled immediatly

Most webmail systems will not give enough info to the user for them to actually see where it came from. The "From:" header means nothing

and besides the block is on the actual telstra mail servers themselves

Re:An Alexandrian Solution...

[spikedvodka]

This is why, when setting up spam filters, I have very few system wide bans (mostly on single machines, or coloated IP blocks) but have installed filters that rate each e-mail and give it a score (yeah spamassasin) I then let the end user decide how to filter

Michael who?

[Anonymous Coward]

I filtered out some bozo named Michael months ago...wonder if it's the same.

Block email from major ISPs...

[Anonymous Coward]

...get more users on AIM.

So in other words, blocking spam creates an opportunity for more ad revenue from the official clients. Go figure.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this have to do with my rights online? Sounds like it's AOL's right to filter out email from whomever they want, and if their customers don't like it, they don't have to use the service.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

true. Needless to say, *.aol.com is on my killfile since ages...

Re:Hey Michael...

[Anonymous Coward]

trollish but enlightening. Mod up +1 Insightful... i mean seriously, how many of you have complained about michael so far? or mod it offtopic..

AOL has done this before...

[tigress]

Telia, Sweden's largest ISP and the defacto telecoms monopoly (it was previously known as Televerket, the state monopoly telco, before it was "privatized"), was blocked by AOL a few months ago.

Personally, I think it wasn't all that bad. Apparently, the reason for the blocking was Telia's excessively poor abuse handling. This was very much due to Telia being the largest - and most arrogant - of the telcos in Sweden, and the realization that they weren't the biggest fish in the pond struck hard. Needless to say, their abuse management has improved significantly afterwards.

This only brings up the question, when will AOL realise that their pond is quite a lot bigger than they think? AOL is playing the very same arrogant I'm Holier Than Thou-game that Telia used to play on its local market. And, big as AOL might be, the Internet is a lot, lot larger.

Not surprised.

[ChibiTaryn]

I'm not surprised, to tell the truth. Two seconds of looking on Whirlpool (the Australian Broadband Users' Community) will highlight exactly how bodgy Bigpond can be. I'm sure their own spam procedures have been less than perfect (or even good) for a long time, so I'm not surprised that other ISP's have had to block them out.

As much as I hate AOL, I'm not sure that this situation is ALL their fault -- if Telstra took the spam problem more seriously themselves, then AOL may not have felt that they need to take this measure.

Still, that all said, I do find it amusing that one bodgy, overpriced major ISP has blocked another bodgy, overpriced major ISP....

Falun Gong

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://www.falundafa.org/eng/faq.htm

Q: What is Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong?
A: Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is an ancient practice for mind and body, originating in pre-historic China. The practice involves some slow, gentle movements and a meditation...

It's being cracked down on by China because of its spiritual nature.

It has absolutely nothing to do with spamming.

Re:Falun Gong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's being cracked down on by China because of its spiritual nature.

... or because it's a dangerous cult, depending who you believe. They certainly fit the usual patterns.

It has absolutely nothing to do with spamming.

I have replied to one persistent Chinese spammer with "Thanks for the information on Falun Dafa", though.

Re:Falun Gong

[meringuoid]

It has absolutely nothing to do with spamming.

It has everything to do with spamming. You get a Chinese spam, don't bother forwarding to abuse@ - Chinese ISPs are spamhausen through and through. Instead, reply to the spammer saying 'Thank you for the information on Falun Gong' or 'My donation to the Free Tibet movement is on its way' or just good old 'Down with dictatorship, long live the democratic revolution'.

Hopefully, that will get the spammer into some trouble. Maybe even trouble of the kind delivered by high-velocity bits of lead (we can but dream...)

Unfortunately, most spam from China (at least from my POV) is sent by Americans, who are beyond the reach of their righteous socialist vengeance. Maybe I could thank them for supporting some Arabic organisation or other. To get a spammer disappeared and taken to Cuba would be wonderful ;-)

Re:Falun Gong

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the Americans be offended by accusations of 'supporting some Arabic organisation or other'? That is a simple statement of fact. This isn't meant to be flamebait - just look at recent (post WWII) US history.

Whitelist is the only solution

[dybdahl]

Spamkillers like this one are also based on whitelisting e-mail addresses (although with built-in mechanisms to enable automatic whitelisting of non-spammers):

http://a-s-k.sourceforge.net/

Since this method works much better than spamassassin, RBL and similar methods, we better get used to whitelisting. Telstra simply has to get onto the whitelist fast.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[spacefight]

This tool is crap:
This program (Active Spam Killer, or ASK for short) takes an "Active" approach in solving the problem: Everytime an email is received, a message is sent back to the sender asking for confirmation. If that sender does not confirm the message, it remains queued for delivery. If the sender confirms, the message is delivered and removed from the queue. The "confirmed" senders will be added to your "whitelist" and will never be sent another confirmation. Messages from these emails will always be delivered immediately . You can also specify an "ignorelist" for emails that should be always ignored and a "blacklist" that will cause a nastygram to be sent back to the sender everytime an email is received.

So how can automated mailing systems such as airline reservation confirmations and such stuff do this confirmation? My point is: whitelisting does not help at all. What if a spammer uses widely used whitelisted addresses such as newsletter From: addresses? Whitelisting does not help - I do not want people have to send mail back for confirmation - it tripples the traffic for one email by the way.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[shepd]

>So how can automated mailing systems such as airline reservation confirmations and such stuff do this confirmation?

If you're just signed up for a new service, check your recent "junk mail" and manually whitelist the account (or domain). Should be a simple as a grep away.

>What if a spammer uses widely used whitelisted addresses such as newsletter From: addresses?

??? From what I can tell from just installing it now, there's no default whitelist addresses in this program at all, apart from MAILER-DAEMON, which the author says he'll remove from future versions if it is abused.

>I do not want people have to send mail back for confirmation - it tripples the traffic for one email by the way.

Yes, for the first email. So what? Real humans aren't going to care if they have to reply once to a confirmation email (that is, if they actually have something important to say), and if a spammer's mailbox (or their ISP's mailserver) fills up, why should I feel bad?

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[spacefight]

Sure there is no default whitelist. But if lots of people have whitelisted addresses or even specific domains - spammer will find out. spammer find out everything and abuses it. Whitelisting is perhaps an option for you but not for an enterprise which does not want to offend their customers. If someone of my friends would implement such a stupid whitelisting system, I would tell them that I just wanted to email them without whitelisting myself. It won't work in the long run or you piss of loads of people/customers. eMail is eMail and ISP (and the people behind them) should better knock off every fucking spammer around and sue them instead that we have to implement even better filters each month.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[shepd]

>But if lots of people have whitelisted addresses or even specific domains - spammer will find out.

Well, if your specific email address is being abused by spammers in this manner, you'll be getting a big enough deluge of hate mail to know that you've trouble on the horizon. Hopefully you (the one with the stolen address) will be able to deal with it.

If the spammer is faking domains, unless you've included a large isp/email serveice (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) in your whitelisted domains, I can't see more than a _very_ few spams getting through.

>Whitelisting is perhaps an option for you but not for an enterprise which does not want to offend their customers.

I can't disagree on this. I'd suggest "general" addressess like info/sales/webmaster be protected with spamassassin (which also works very well) instead. I think specific employees could still use whitelisting without major problems, unless they're sales staff.

>If someone of my friends would implement such a stupid whitelisting system, I would tell them that I just wanted to email them without whitelisting myself.

The whitelisting is automatic. You respond to the check message, and it adds you. Otherwise you're talking to the hand, so to speak. :)

>eMail is eMail and ISP (and the people behind them) should better knock off every fucking spammer around and sue them instead that we have to implement even better filters each month.

The last thing we need, IMHO, is more laws. A better, more secure (perhaps) email system is really in order.

The only time a spammer needs to be put to a judge is if they break a real law (which many, but not all, do) like cracking systems to spam, or abusing open relays (a little bit grey there).

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[spacefight]

>The whitelisting is automatic. You respond to the check message, and it adds you. Otherwise you're talking to the hand, so to speak. :)

This is not automatic, this is manual. You have to send the message back manual.

>The last thing we need, IMHO, is more laws. A better, more secure (perhaps) email system is really in order. The only time a spammer needs to be put to a judge is if they break a real law (which many, but not all, do) like cracking systems to spam, or abusing open relays (a little bit grey there).

Spammers are breaking "real" laws every second as lots the states in the US have the law against UCE as I'm sure you know. In other countries are laws against unfair competition which can be used to sue spammer. Problem is always that it is a civil case then and costs loads of money...

Blacklisting spamfriendly ISPs is the only way they learn it. Kill the source.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[shepd]

>This is not automatic, this is manual. You have to send the message back manual.

That can't honestly be a big deal. You're just hitting reply, once, per person (not per email) you want to send to. You don't need to retype your original email, nor do you even have to remember what it was about. It's simply held for a ransom of one reply on my machine. That's it.

If anyone were to email me and couldn't be bothered replying to the check message, I figure they must not have anything interesting or important to say anyways.

>Spammers are breaking "real" laws every second as lots the states in the US have the law against UCE as I'm sure you know.

Yeah, but I'm Canadian. Remember, these laws only apply to 5% of the world. In fact, they apply to less, as they aren't US-wide. Probably more like 1% of the world is affected by such laws. Good luck trying to prosecute someone outside of the US under any such laws!

>In other countries are laws against unfair competition which can be used to sue spammer.

I've never heard of that one before. Unfair competition? Que? Like antitrust unfair competition? How can an email be unfair competition? If you don't want public email, block your server's SMTP port from public view. If you don't do that and wonder why you're being solicited, well, my head is spinning.

>Blacklisting spamfriendly ISPs is the only way they learn it. Kill the source.

That's been tried and it didn't work (MAPS RBL). Or at least, it didn't work well enough for anyone to notice it "working" as far as I could tell. Worse yet it really started to screw over a lot of little guys who were caught in the crossfire. It's like bombing Iraq to remove their leader (whoops, did I say that?).

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[jez9999]

The whitelisting is automatic. You respond to the check message, and it adds you.

So, couldn't a spammer's mailer just send a nonsense msg to [spamlist], a confirmation message to [spamlist] and then the actual spam to [spamlist]? Sure, they'd have to send out 3 times as much e-mail but they sure as hell don't seem to have major problems sending out vast quantities. The check message would have to be made somewhat cryptic to respond correctly to in order to fool the spammers' mailers, in which case it would be harder for genuine people to whitelist themselves. Sure, anyone with a brain (that rules some people out already) could do it, but it would hardly be 'effortless'.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[morzel]

You can also specify an "ignorelist" for emails that should be always ignored and a "blacklist" that will cause a nastygram to be sent back to the sender everytime an email is received.

On a different note: please DO NOT send "automatic nastygrams", because in the majority of the cases the return addresses are faked and your nastygram will end up with an innocent third party that is being hit with a lot of bounces... (been there, done that). Nastygrams don't work, contacting their upstream provide abuse team is the best course of action.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[Reziac]

How much would it help if instead of whitelisting addresses (which sucks for a lot of us for reasons you mentioned, and because some of us *need* blind business contacts), it whitelisted servers known NOT to be an open relay?

I know some spammers use "legit" access, but since the idea here seems to be to punish sloppy ISPs...

[Personally, I don't want my ISP deciding for me where I can receive mail from, spam or not. So consider the above a technical query.]

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[some guy I know]

So, couldn't a spammer's mailer just send a nonsense msg to [spamlist], a confirmation message to [spamlist] and then the actual spam to [spamlist]?

No, becuase the request for confirmation would likely not make it back to the SPAMmer, because most SPAM has faked Reply-To: fields.
If you are thinking about sending the confirmation without even getting a request, that is easily foiled by including a random string (e.g., "f8vd09") in the request subject or body.
If the confirmation emial subject or body does not contain the random string, it's a fake confirmation, and can be discarded.

There are many other ways that this type of scheme can be defeated.

Re:Whitelist is the only solution

[some guy I know]

please DO NOT send "automatic nastygrams", because in the majority of the cases the return addresses are faked

That's why you should complain to the originating or upstream IP, instead.
I complain to abuse@, admin@, sales@, etc., etc., at the IP's contacts (and the domain's contacts, as well, if the RDNS resolves), along with any domains that the SPAM is pushing, along with whoever is responsible for the IP that a DNS of the domain resolves to, plus the domain that an RDNS of the IP resolves to (if any).

I also send a copy to the person in the From: and Reply-To: fields anyway, with an explanation that I believe that the header was forged, and here is the SPAM email, in case you want to take legal action against the SPAMmer.

And, of course, I send a copy to uce@ftc.gov, and forward the SPAM to my ISP's SPAM detector submission address and submit@spamarchive.org.

I have at times sent complaints to over 100 email addresses about a single piece of SPAM.
If they don't like it, then they shouldn't send me SPAM in the first place.

AOL's new mantra...

[CPgrower]

"You've lost mail"

Irony at its best

[evil9000]

i was receiving spam from bigpond people, but when i looked into it, the person had renamed their box to bigpond.com.au. When i looked closer, the person was using an aol dialup account.

Irony under any other name?

*whitelist*???

[autopr0n]

So, AOL is blocking all mail from ISPs they haven't heard of? That's got to work really well. I can't even imagine a majority of their users wouldn't be at least have one or two people they know blocked by this.

Why don't they just implement sender-verification? (i.e. if you haven't been 'authenticated' for the user, you'll be asked to reply to an email to prove you're legitimate. And once you do that, you'll never need to do it again).

It doesn't seem like it would be very much trouble for AOL to implement, it would clear up 99.9999% of their spam problems, and it would certainly be a better solution then white listing

Re:*whitelist*???

[sabNetwork]

"Sender verification" is a good idea, but it won't work for most users.

Not all automated email is bad. A user who has "sender verification" on would not receive an Amazon.com sales receipt, for instance, because there is no way Amazon.com would go through the trouble to "authenticate" just for the AOL user.

Yeah, well...

[autopr0n]

Why not build some of their own sea lines, then? I'd bet a private AU company could probably afford, and profit from a huge pipe to Japan, or even the US. But would they be allowed to make money with Telstra around?

Also, wouldn't it make sense for them to allow unlimited in-country bandwidth while capping international traffic? At my school they have an outbound cap at 200 megs a day, but you can send as much as you want on campus.

Re:Yeah, well...

[munro]

That's exactly what used to happen (and maybe still does?) in New Zealand - national traffic was cheap and sometimes unlimited, and international traffic was more expensive. What else can an ISP in a small far away country do? They have to foot the bill for the link to an ISP in some big country as a "client" rather than as a peer.

Re:Yeah, well...

[drsmithy]

Why not build some of their own sea lines, then? I'd bet a private AU company could probably afford, and profit from a huge pipe to Japan, or even the US. But would they be allowed to make money with Telstra around?

Because they still have to pay to get the data *into* the pipe at the other end. That's where the cost is - the prices US ISPs extort from the rest of the world for data originating within the US.

Also, wouldn't it make sense for them to allow unlimited in-country bandwidth while capping international traffic?

It makes sense to allow unlimited or extremely low cost "on-net" traffic, which most ISPs do.

Re:Yeah, well...

[swb]

They need to stop negotiating as a lone country and form a consortium that buys transit from the US as a group and then subdivide the savings among the member countries.

Re:Yeah, well...

[oh]

Why not build some of their own sea lines, then? I'd bet a private AU company could probably afford, and profit from a huge pipe to Japan, or even the US. But would they be allowed to make money with Telstra around?

Its not the cost of the pipe through to another country. Sure this is a cost that is going to increase the cost of trans-pacific IP. Its the peering arrangement with the major US ISPs. I once worked for a large .au website. We had an upload:download ration of 8:1, for both international and domestic. Because of this we didn't pay for domestic Internet traffic, out ISP could bill other ISPs for the traffic they downloaded off our site, so we were a good customer to have. This relates to your next point.

Also, wouldnâ(TM)t it make sense for them to allow unlimited in-country bandwidth while capping international traffic? At my school they have an outbound cap at 200 megs a day, but you can send as much as you want on campus.

This does happen. My old University had three charge rates for home dialup. The account cost nothing, you paid X cents/meg for international traffic, Y cents/meg for domestic, and downloads from within the university networks was free (this included the other major domestic universities). X was approximatly 6.5 times Y. This could possibly be because of the cost of the trans-pacific pipe? Maybe, but Maybe not.

When I worked for the website, we received credit for domestic traffic, but not international. We had to pay approx $US45 /Gb downloaded from overseas. Why were we charged this when we had such a good upload:download ratio? Because our ISP did not get credit from their US based ISP for uploads. Our uploads were worth nothing to out ISP, so we didn't get any credit for them. Of course the US based ISP would be charging their customers for downloading our traffic from their network, but they wouldn't have to pay anyone for it. Advantage of being a Tier 1 ISP.

"view this content without impacting allowance"

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah, I just looked at the Telstra BigPond site to see advertised special "unmetered sites" which don't "impact your monthly usage allowance". That reminds me of the bad old days of CompuServe 10 years ago where there were a few "basic" services which you weren't charged online time for, but most things (including "the Internet") had an hourly charge. I know in this case it's a ridiculous monthly bandwidth limitation (1GB or something?) but please!

Hello, Australia??? Why do you put up with this shit? Do they have a forced monopoly in certain areas, where you must use their service for some types of ISP connectivity

Re:"view this content without impacting allowance"

[nzyank]

I'm in NZ where we have the same thing. There's a finite amount of bandwidth so we get charged by the MB. Southern Cross cable. Under the water. I think they used standard telephone cable. Scary thing is that DSL here is fast as hell so you can go through your 1 GB/month in a couple of hours with no problem.

Re:"view this content without impacting allowance"

[hughk]

If DSL is working so fast in NZ, why don't they ease up a little on the b/w restrictions or at least qualify it so that offshore bytes count but local bytes don't?

In any case, isn't there fibre between you and Oz? Unless the sheep get cable, I can't see that link getting filled too quickly.

Time to block AOL from my little mail server

[LWolenczak]

I've got a small mail server, but its time to just block aol email in return, so, will a postfix god tell us how to block them with leaving a nice little message saying "Sorry AOL User, due to AOL Blacklisting everybody but major US ISPs, the Internet Community is forced to block them in return, So Get a real ISP (NOT earthlink, because they are pulling this same shit)"

Re:Time to block AOL from my little mail server

[42forty-two42]

Personally, I'd do it with procmail - you could more easily return a message that dosen't look like a bounce, and thus isn't ignored by the typical AOL luser.

Re:Time to block AOL from my little mail server

[Anonymous Coward]

I can only hope that Earthlink, my provider, is doing this. I had to create a second email account to use and am letting my first one die on the vine (5% of 10mb used in 4 days, 99.5% of which is spam) due to the sheer amount of spam I was receiving.

I wish Earthlink would do the same to both China and Brazil. That would stop 90% of all the spam out there.

Actualy...

[autopr0n]

A couple guys in australia are responsible for a huge amount of porno spam. Including the animal stuff...

Re:Actualy...

[Corporate Troll]

It's meant funny... Laugh.

So what about the animal stuff. If some people like that, let them watch it. It's not as if I like all the pr0n you have on your site.

FINALLY

[shepd]

This is the tool I've been waiting for forever! I would find out about it the day after I get qmail + spamassassin set up, but hey, that's life.

Sure, I'd have coded it, but then it'd be done in VB and would crash hourly.

Many thanks to the author!

Bleh

[autopr0n]

Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is an ancient practice for mind and body, originating in pre-historic China. The practice involves some slow, gentle movements and a meditation...

If by 'ancient' you mean '1985'

Re:Bleh

[Uri]

If by 'ancient' you mean '1985'

Not really. Although Falun Gong was popularized in 1992 (accompanied by semi-founded accusations of cultism), it is essentially a form of Qigong, an ancient Chinese medical technique.

That's alright...

[The Fanta Menace]

...I've been blocking AOL for years. Only fair for them to reciprocate.

Holy Crap!!!! Those Bastards!

[nzyank]

I'm in Christchurch, NZ and just tried sending an email to my wife's grandparents@AOL.COM and it keeps getting bounced by AOL. We use xtra, NZ's piece of shit service (and I *know* it's a piece of shit because I used to have @home in the US and I now know what a piece of shit service looks like.

what AOL needs is a good booting

[the-build-chicken]

This is an outrage!

I'm going to take this all the way to the Prime Minister!

Hey Mr. Prime Minister!

Andy!

Re:what AOL needs is a good booting

[TheOneWhoIsMany]

When will you lot get over that damn Australian stereotype! Any way I'm off now into my backyard there is this crocodile in there and I need to wrestle him and take him to a wildlife park.

Re:what AOL needs is a good booting

[the-build-chicken]

crickey...that's dangerous...but I tell ya what, she must be a little beauty, I'm just gunna get my mate russ to 'ave a look (by the way, Australian and loving the stereotype for 29 years ;) )

Re:what AOL needs is a good booting

[The Cydonian]

If you're taking him to a wildlife park, don't use that bridge connecting Oz and NZ.

Re:what AOL needs is a good booting

[Anonymous Coward]

as an australian i can honestly say
we have a good sense of humor and australians LOVE that joke.. are you really australian? it seems a little unaustralian to get insulted by a joke, since we enjoy taking the piss out of every other country that exists (especially americans).

Re:what AOL needs is a good booting

[Anonymous Coward]

as an australian, i can honestly say your sense of humour is a bloody disgrace.

Wouldn't it be easier

[kasperd]

to just disconnect AOL from the internet?

Telstra is a spam supporter

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish my ISP would do the same. According to my SpamAssasin logs, 1 in 12 spam emails I received over the past 3 months came from or via a Telstra computer.

In related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

sourceforge.net starts blocking mail not relayed by an isp mail server. (and yes they actually do now) Rather annoying :/

Re:In related news..

[jez9999]

Erm, how do you mean 'an ISP mail server'? For instance, would they define my e-mail provider, runbox.com, as an ISP? It's not a _dialup_ ISP, but it provides an internet service (e-mail).

Re:In related news..

[devnullify]

Trying 66.35.250.206...
Connected to mail.sf.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 sc8-sf-list1.sourceforge.net ESMTP Exim 3.31-VA-mm2 #1 Mon, 28 Apr 2003 11:28:25 -0700 - SF sc8-list1 mm5
mail from: ktims@gotroot.ca
250 is syntactically correct
rcpt to: galeon-users@lists.sourceforge.net
550-Host ani456f1y17wg.ab.hsia.telus.net [142.59.210.30] is not permitted to send mail to or through
550-sc8-sf-list1.sourceforge.net.
550-Di alup connections are not permitted to directly use this mail server.
550-Please use your ISP's mail server instead
550-("See http://mail-abuse.org/dul/")
550 mail from 142.59.210.30 rejected: administrative prohibition (host is blacklisted)

I'm on a business class ADSL connection in my area. I could very easily be a business running an internal SMTP server. It's obviously some sort of dialup-pool RBL, but these are too strict imo. Confirmed sources only...

A good kick up the arse motivate them...

[vandan]

Obviously this is embarrassing to Telstra. While it may inconvenience a few businesses temporarily, it might be worth it if it makes Telstra and other ISPs take a stronger stance against spam. I get a bit of spam from AOL users myself, so I can't say that they are setting a perfect example. But I don't care if it means I'll get less spam.

'This town ain't big enough for the both of us!'

[grolschie]

Telstra is Australia's largest ISP

Methinks it sounds like AOL Australia is trying to muscle-in on more of the Australian ISP market?

A very good move

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe telestra bigpond will fix their email servers now, or take action against the spammers.I find it not to be AOL's problem but to be telestra's problem.
It's not AOL's fault that telestra bigpond is even lamer than they are. :-)

It's not ISPs open relays, it's customer PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

Alas, it's not the ISPs that run the open relays, or at least not many of them do anymore --- for the most part they've now got clued up on that.

Where open relays are running most commonly nowadays is on the PCs of customers of those ISPs, and dealing with that problem is vastly more difficult. For a start, even those that advocate sledgehammers which hurt innocent parties find that it doesn't help much, as not only are the IPs dynamic but the actual ISP customer dialpool ranges are fragmented and change a lot as well. (The days of huge single monolithic customer dialpool ranges allocated to ISPs are long gone.)

In addition, only a proportion of those ISPs have caller-ID information on dialups, so pinpointing spamming customers becomes less than fully reliable, and legally almost impossible in most places.

It all adds up to a pretty big problem, and it's definitely not solved by focussing on ISP's own open relays. For the most part, they no longer exist.

Re:It's not ISPs open relays, it's customer PCs

[leviramsey]

Actually, most spam I'm getting now is through what appear to be DSL, cable or other high-speed connections. Dial-up spamming is a thing of the past. Why? Because of the fact that you can't do that much spamming through dialup, because it's not always on and it's not that fast.

Consider this. A spam is say 5Kbytes. Thus it's 40Kbits. Luser is running an open relay on his dialup connection. Each spam takes at least 2 seconds to send (because at least 80Kbits of traffic is generated). So anyone running an open relay that is being used continuously to send spam would find that their connection is useless. Now, this doesn't cover the case where the dialup user is intentionally spamming. But even then, there aren't likely to be many left, because of the speed and connection-dropping issues.

Contrast this with a cable or DSL connection. Even the slowest types of these connections at least double the spamsending capacity, and the open-relay can eat all the upstream bandwidth, thanks to their highly asymmetric nature, which makes detection of the openrelay by the user less likely. In addition, there's a lot fewer cases of a user getting kicked on these services. In the intentional case, the spammer, knowing that they have quadrupled the number of spams they can send (and thus quadruple their billings for spams sent) for a fairly insignificant increase in connection costs.

I strongly suspect that the explosion in spamming tracks the explosion in consumer high-speed connections very closely. I further suspect that the latter is causing the former.

My personal policy on blacklists (I am opposed to the centralized blacklists, as they pose too many ethical problems) is this: if I receive a spam through the server I run, I blacklist the entire netblock of the IP that connected to my server. I've blocked over 15 /16s in China and Korea. To allow legitimate communications, the rejection bounce includes a note that to communicate with this host, please email..." with the address being one that is not handled by this server.

ok..

[eonblueye]

Sounds fair to me. Bigpond knows that they have a problem with abuse. They should of done something about it!! Plain and simple and good for AOL. I hope others will follow in their foot steps.

AOL dial in

[bernywork]

I think the funny part is this, I have been led to believe that when AOL setup here in Australia, Telstra provided the dial in for AOL.

I think the dial-in lines are now being hosted by MCI Worldcom.

Telstra v. AOL

[SJ]

Don't forget that AOL and Telstra are very large rivals. They probably have some form of peering agreement and if AOL is blocking Telstra, then that is data that AOL isn't download from Telstra which swings the peering ratios.

Telstra is probably not blocking AOL though, which further increases the ratios in AOL's favour.

Weird category.

[Trillan]

Since when do you have a right to have your email accepted by the other server?

"Telstra is one of our largest ISPs."

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like the US stating that "Microsoft is one of our largest software companies". Telstra is a previously government owned now public company which has a monopolistic stranglehold on the telecommunications industry here, especially broadband. Unfair practices mean high cost and poor service for every IS, espcially ADSL. So, thank you sincerely, AOL, for making their day that little bit harder :0)

Slashdot has been blocking NTL for months

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has been refusing to accept postings from NTL cable modem customers for months. That's most UK broadband customers you're not hearing from.

Re:Slashdot has been blocking NTL for months

[Anonymous Coward]

Most UK Broadband customers? Interested to see your stats.

Re:Slashdot has been blocking NTL for months

[Anonymous Coward]

uh? i'm on NTL cable here, works fine...

DSL/dialup does not automatically mean spam.

[TrentTheThief]

The practice of automatically branding everyone having a dynamic IP and sending email via their own domains. Using non-ISP email servers is not a crime.

I own several domains, a few of them for almost 9 years. In that time I have used seven or eight IPs. Only for a year or so did I have a fixed IP. I don't send spam, my servers are not open relays, but I am penalized now because I can not get a fixed IP from Verizon.

First, Osirus starts using the wirelist to block dynamic IPs, now AOL is blocking dynamic IP.

Why should I be restricted to sending mail from a verizon address? I am a business owner who has domains representing my business. Why is it wrong to want my emails to come from _my_ domain and not from Verizon?

Don't even start with the pompous BS about doing SSH tunneling, or expecting business class service for consumer prices. I don't want to hear it. I'm paying business prices for my service. So sod off. Not everyone is in a position to physically host their own on-site server or afford their own OC-3.

Is any of this blocking really going to affect the spam situation? I don't think so. Spam is economically viable because consumers continue to shop from businesses that use spam as a marketing tool. Consumers continue to buy spammed products.

Spam is not a problem that will be solved by refucing email from entire IP blocks. Spam is a consumer education problem.

If people were as quick to boycott spammed product as they have been to pour french wine in the gutter, spam would be a thing of the past.

Re:DSL/dialup does not automatically mean spam.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in a similar situation, but am suspicious of the motives. AOL, MSN and Yahoo want to start charging people for email - that's what is really going on. I don't believe the amount of mail I get from these web-based services - even when the sender works for a large company with their own mail server.

My solution is simply to ssh into the server at work if I need to send a document from home. Sadly there are more infected IIS servers and open relays on my upstreams netblock than on my home providers. So how long before they start blocking buisness static IP's too? Hell - I've blocked most of our upstreams netblock at work.

What we are seeing here is a few large companies redefining email so they can profit from it. Spam can be effectively curtailed by blocking persistant offenders but there are already blacklists availiable, if these companies are really serious about stopping SPAM why are they not co-operating and supporting existing anti-spam orgs?

As a short-term solution to AOL's broken servers (no longer RFC compliant), I propose coding a little smtp server that just keeps trying to send the mail forever. AOL are not the only people who can break RFC's. I wonder how many of us would have to run it before they got a clue?

Re:DSL/dialup does not automatically mean spam.

[Abcd1234]

I own several domains, a few of them for almost 9 years. In that time I have used seven or eight IPs. Only for a year or so did I have a fixed IP. I don't send spam, my servers are not open relays, but I am penalized now because I can not get a fixed IP from Verizon.

Frankly, I'd think you'd understand the reason behind the MAPS DUL, given your obvious amount of experience on the 'net. If a user is forced to send email through their ISP's SMTP server, this makes it far more difficult to exploit open relays using dial-up accounts. It also forces an audit trail, since the ISP likely logs mail transactions, and would probably notice massive mail spikes caused by dial-up accounts being abused to send spam.

As for your particular situation, I'm assuming Verizon doesn't let you send emails using their SMTP server unless they are addressed using the Verizon domain. This is clearly a problem with their setup and warrants a complaint (especially if you're paying for business-class service). But don't attack what is, IMHO, a perfectly legitimate method of curtailing spam because your ISP is braindamaged and you're unable or unwilling to switch.

Re:DSL/dialup does not automatically mean spam.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had a mail server on a static IP for 2 years and I'm still blocked by AOL. My non-tech friends (who use AOL :-P) think I have some kind of bad internet because they can't get my email. Of course, they also tell me my website doesn't work because they type .com instead of .org EVERY TIME.

Re:DSL/dialup does not automatically mean spam.

[tedgyz]

It's as simple as this - they are saying I am guilty until proven innocent. I have my own domains and run my own server 24/7. I am connected to MediaO... er AT&... er ComCast and although my IP is dynamic, it remains relatively stable. They even have a registered DNS entry for me (transferred from MediaOne days).

I manage my own SMTP server - no open relays. It's just the way I want to run my email. In fact, I just hooked up to spamhaus.org and relays.ordb.org.

Why is this a crime?

Re:DSL/dialup does not automatically mean spam.

[Abcd1234]

Oh, gotcha, your reasons are philosophical. :) 'course, I disagree, but that's just IMHO... I believe the easiest way to a spam-free (or, at least, minimized) world is to make sure all the SMTP servers out there are somehow authenticated against one another. One step toward this goal is to not accept email from IPs which are a potential spam source, such as end-user boxes on subnets you aren't responsible for. And, no, using filtering or mail-authentication techniques like PGP is not suffient, because the spam is still soaking up bandwidth and CPU cycles... the only way to really stop the problem is to not accept the spam in the first place.

BTW, you should ask your ISP to remove you from the MAPS DUL (they have to add their IPs to it in the first place). If your ISP really does manage a DNS entry for you, they must realize you're running services on your box, so they may be willing to do this.

No One Who Will Be Missed

[fire-eyes]

See Subject line.

AOL seem to block everyone...

[martin]

lately they seem to be blocking everyone who appears to be sending spam. Oxford University (http://www.ox.ac.uk) got blocked for about 6 weeks until AOL pulled their finger out and realised what they'd done.

Seems the sys-admins on the anti-spam bit are clueless and regularly delete whole domains that have the 'from' section of spam releting to them ,even if it is an obvious forged address.

Or maybe they are trying to take over the world by only allowing internal emails to flow unobstructed?-)

I wonder how Ziggy feels?

[Anonymous Coward]

The big man around this part of the world just got bitch slapped by a company that could buy him for breakfast.

how about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

an ISP after a certain software company's heart!

A Small Extension...

[suwain_2]

This doesn't appear to be the case, but this is a scary scenario I've often thought could happen.

Suppose, just suppose, that AOL charged a premium to receive mail from non-AOL members. International e-mail would cost even more. Similarly, "premium" websites (any popular places, cnn.com, wsj.com, etc.) cost a few extra dollars a month.

Again, I'm not suggesting that AOL is doing this, I'm merely using this to illustrate a fear that I've long had -- having various charges for each website you visit. It'd destroy the Internet as we know it, but ISPs could make a killing that way.

Re:A Small Extension...

[Reziac]

Not so farfetched, IMO. I know AOL users who still believe that they can only exchange email with another AOL user. It's a short hop from a common user belief to a common billing practice...

Much like what someone mentioned above, that many people believe their ISP's portal page has to be set as their home page, or the internet will stop working. What if you had to pay extra for the privilege of setting it somewhere else?

We'd be back to the days of the closed "online services" and itemized billing in a helluva hurry.

I know most clueful users would rebel, but average joes who don't do computers in their sleep wouldn't know what to do other than eat what they're fed.

Mod Parent UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

My kingdom for mod points!
Hey mods, parent is at least +3 funny!

As an Aussie I have to agree

[shione]

Interesting, interesting. I'm from australia as well but I wouldnt touch telstra;s internet service with a 10 foot pole. I always go for the underdog like optus or comindincgo to provide my access. telstra charges too much and their service is crap compared to the competition. Unfortunately they also hold a strangle hold on the market and control 90% of broadband access, landlines and mobiles. For the average australian using a diff company just isnt an option. thats how telstra gets away with charging exorbient sums for a 3rd world service.

I wonder if anyone else noticed, in yesterdays /. article on open proxys, listed was a bigpond address.

Sysadmins: Block AOL SMTP

[Bob9113]

Block inbound SMTP from AOL. Set a cutoff date, nofity all of your users, and stand firm. The further they get down this path the more accepted this practice will become. Once this practice becomes accepted, it is entirely likely that other protocols will begin being blocked for other reasons (suppose the RIAA suggests that AOL block all connections to non-commercial HTTP servers to avoid piracy liability).

It is not unreasonable to see this as the first step in the stratification of the Internet into corporate sanctioned, generally accessible servers and cordoned-off slums. This is every bit as dangerous, if not more so, than government censorship.

Note: it will anger your users. I know, because it angered my users. The biggest problem was that they did not understand why. I've posted a FAQ to address their most common questions.

If we give an inch now, later they will take a yard. Better to endure a little pain now than to try to stand against the tide in a year or two.

Re:Sysadmins: Block AOL SMTP

[Anonymous Coward]

From your own FAQ:

2. How are [AOL] violating RFC 2821?
They are denying email to an entire class of machines (all dynamic DSL IP addresses). The RFC specifies, "SMTP systems are expected to make every reasonable effort to accept mail directed to Postmaster from any other system on the Internet."

And by blocking all mail from AOL, you're not in violation of 2821?

Re:Sysadmins: Block AOL SMTP

[Bob9113]

By blocking the dynamic DSL IPs, AOL has removed itself from the global SMTP network.

The blind leading the blind...

[d3ut3r0n]

Most people say AOL is a monolithic shit-for-brains company that everyone with more than half-an-hour of experience on the net hates, cool. I have little if anything to do with them...

..but, to Australians, Telstra invokes a similar reaction. Many Americans would be surprised to see what this monopolistic company charges for local calls, mobile phone calls, internet access and cable tv (with foxtel).

Look at their internet broadband rates:
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/access/ADSL/plans /

Are you kidding me?

Just as bad are the costs of mobiles, text messages and calls:

http://www.telstra.com.au/mobilenet/price_options/ more4you.htm

25c a text message!? Wtf?

Australians might want to support Australian businesses, but this company doesn't deserve loyalty. I welcome any negative action against Telstra - especially from giant US corporations. Oh please - won't some US telco come in to Australia and NOT play by telstra's rules?!

Re:The blind leading the blind...

[ttys00]

Don't forget this is in Australian dollars - this morning 1 Aussie dollar was worth just over 61 US cents.

As for supporting Australian businesses, I'd love to support a Telstra rival - Telstra owns the exchanges that all the other ISP's have to get access to, and charges high rates for access so no other ISP can undercut them with their broadband.

Re:The blind leading the blind...

[d3ut3r0n]

You can't do a direct comparison to the price using exchange rates, because Australian's do not earn US dollars! To them, it is very expensive in comparison!

Re:The blind leading the blind...

[ttys00]

The prices quoted on the Telstra website are in Aussie dollars, not US dollars. So an SMS costing 25 cents is 25 Aussie cents, which is about 15 US cents.

Telstra is a great Aussie exporter

[Anonymous Coward]

Their latest government approved export is IT jobs.

Furore over Telstra outsourcing

Seriously though, we have exported the low paying jobs for years - we need to start exporting the CEO jobs. If we can get a few cheaper CEOs from India, that would save far more than few thousand like me grunts.

AOL sucks

[56ksucks]

AOL sucks monkey nuts.

Interim solution

[Zog The Undeniable]

Sign up for web-based e-mail, assuming AOL haven't blocked that too. I assume AOL will eventually remove these filters due to improved practices at the offending ISPs/customer complaints.

Anyway, tell your wife's grandparents they will never pwn at CounterStrike until they get an ISP with respectable pings ;-)

Don't contribute to the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply don't contribute to the problem by assigning a moving target (a dynamic IP) to your domain name. That's just irresponsible. You complain that it's too expensive to physically host your own server. Fine. Hosting companies offer plenty of good deals and you can put your mail server there - WITH YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME.
What, you're running smtp on your desktop? Again, irresponsible.

Why should I be restricted to sending mail from a verizon address? I am a business owner who has domains representing my business. Why is it wrong to want my emails to come from _my_ domain and not from Verizon?

Re:Don't contribute to the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Running SMTP on a 'desktop' is not 'irresponsible' actually. Trusting your companies mail to a shared hosting enviroment is irresponsable if you are technically competent then you know better. I run SMTP/IMAP on boxen at home and at work, none of which have any form of windowing display. The machine at work is not on a desktop and my home server is a rack unit - by your own reasoning therefore I am not 'irresponsible'.

Re:Don't contribute to the problem...

[TrentTheThief]

Are you familiar with DNS? My domains have fixed IPs. They have always had a fixed IP. The problem is that my ISP will not provide a fixed IP, hence my complaint about Osirus using wirelist to block dynamic IPs.

I already have a fine hosting company. They are quite sufficient and I send them a fair chunk of money each month for my server. But that doesn't do dick to solve the blocking problem caused by verizon not supporting fixed-IP addresses.

I'm sorry if that wasn't clearly understood from my original post. This dynamic-IP blocking crap is my hot button. I don't send spam, nor do I buy spammed products, either. _And_ I make that fact known to the manufacturers.

This is an economics problem. As long as people can make money spamming, it will continue. When people selling products and services suffer from boycott actions, then the spam will diminish, but not before.

Re:Don't contribute to the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need to do any sort of cost accounting for different departments, then your distributed solution doesn't fly. I suppose you could work out some way of polling your users machines, but I would think the extra bandwidth consumed by that would cause more problems than they're worth.

Yaaawn!

[christrs]

They should have blocked foreign spam sources a long time ago. I block all email from outside the us and block the major american span sources (AOL, MSN, Earthlink, Compuserve and Hotmail).

I dont have a spam problem and I still get the email I want to see.

Chris

Re:Yaaawn!

[caitsith01]

"I block all email from outside the us" Good to see the global village taking another giant stride forward.

No! No! No!

[smiff]

The solution to spam is a technical one, involving distributed validation of digital certificates. If you think about it, this could be done while still preserving people's privacy

This is the same as having a national ID. If we implemented this crazy plan, web sites would require you to validate your identity before you could read the news, comment on politics, or listen to music. Federal regulations would make it a felony to forge your identity. The government would require service providers to log identities at discussion sites to crack down on copyright pirates and libelous accusations. Anyone who refused to "voluntarily surrender" their privacy would be treated like a second-class citizen.

A better solution is to require the sender to solve a time-consuming problem the first time they send something. The more people you initiate contact with, the more processing power you need.

Re:No! No! No!

[gonz]

This is the same as having a national ID. If we implemented this crazy plan, web sites would require you to validate your identity before you could read the news, comment on politics, or listen to music. Federal regulations would make it a felony to forge your identity.

If that were true, then PGP would receive the same criticism as Palladium. Digital certificates can be used for MANY purposes, not just verification of real-life identities.

A better solution is to require the sender to solve a time-consuming problem the first time they send something.

That's a great idea... but how do you identify the "sender"? By their IP address? By their "From:" address? These are easily forged. Digital certificates can be used to verify anything, not just real-life identities. It can be done via a cooperative, decentralized network. It can be done anonymously.

Think about how PGP works. Think about MD5 hashes for Linux packages.

-Gonz

Re:No! No! No!

[Brendan Byrd]

That's a great idea... but how do you identify the "sender"? By their IP address? By their "From:" address? These are easily forged. Digital certificates can be used to verify anything, not just real-life identities. It can be done via a cooperative, decentralized network. It can be done anonymously.

By their Received path? How do you think SpamCop works?

Re:No! No! No!

[smiff]

If that were true, then PGP would receive the same criticism as Palladium. Digital certificates can be used for MANY purposes, not just verification of real-life identities.

Any spammer can generate a new PGP signature for each message. Why would you trust it? You could maintain your own whitelist, but you can already do that. The alternative is to let somebody else maintain a whitelist. Someone you trust (a certificate authority) has to sign the author's signature saying, "this person doesn't send spam". If you only accept mail signed by a CA, that CA decides who can or cannot send mail to you.

If a CA signs a spammer's certificate, no one will trust them. So the whole scheme is going to require accountability, probably enforced by some well-known top-level CA. The top-level CA has to have some sort of power (e.g. power to revoke a certificate) to enforce the rules. When the rules are broken, people will demand regulation for CAs.

Regarding privacy, websites routinely ask for an email address. If everyone has an authenticated digital certificate, websites will start carding their visitors. They may even require people to sign the terms of service. Keep in mind, digital certificates are legally binding signatures.

Finally, considering how common identity theft is, your proposal won't make any difference with illegal spam (Nigerian money laundering, repair your credit, etc.).

That's a great idea...

I'm not sure if it's a great idea. Just something I got from another Slashdotter.

but how do you identify the "sender"?

You don't have to. Once they've solved the problem, you give them a signed certificate. From that point on, any time they send you mail, they attach the signed certificate proving they have sent you mail before. If that mail was spam, you can revoke their certificate.

It can be done via a cooperative, decentralized network. It can be done anonymously.

How are those systems going to keep someone from generating a bunch of keys and tossing them on the network?

Re:No! No! No!

[gonz]

Once they've solved the problem, you give them a signed certificate. From that point on, any time they send you mail, they attach the signed certificate proving they have sent you mail before. If that mail was spam, you can revoke their certificate.

This is a good proposal. The idea would be for individual recipients to issue certificates to senders which allow their messages to be delivered. I can think of a variety of ways these certificates could be obtained:

- Through a web page "Turing test"
- On a business card
- Transitively through a delegate or group membership
- As part of signing up for a service

The key feature is that the recipient can easily revoke the certificate at any time if it is abused. It's is similar to the approach where you generate special-purpose e-mail addresses for each sender, except it preserves a consistent address / identity.

But whatever approach is chosen, it has to be standardized and integrated into the mail protocols. It will never work if it's something that individuals must hack together with CGI scripts and procmail, particularly if you want to support legitimate automated e-mail such as mailing lists, e-commerce receipts, newsletters etc. Software implementors must agree on the certificates and interface model in order to interoperate.

My point is that AOL, Hotmail, etc. could do this. These groups control user bases large enough to provide the critical mass for adoption. Without mainstream support, it would just be another obscure entry on freshmeat.net that no one uses. :-)

-Gonz

Telstra was *always* clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the telecom industry, so I'm posting anonymous-cowardly...

Telstra has always been the most clueless phone company from any developed country. Sure, VSNL in India is even more clueless, and Thailand or small islands are pretty difficult, but they're Less Developed Countries, and China's telecom business is currently fragmented by warlords until the ex-Communists finish transitioning into capitalist bosses, but even they've got more of a clue than Telstra. And the US cable TV companies are not only suicidally clueless about the Internet, but they've been taking Telstra's great ideas about bandwidth caps and using them to shoot themselves in any feet they've got left also. And the European phone companies used to be excessively greedy about what they charged, before competition and liberalization started changing that, but at least you could usually buy what you wanted if you had enough money and didn't mind four-month installation intervals for things like an E1 in Amsterdam. But Telstra has always taken the cake for being the least competent phone company that was big enough that is should have known what it's doing.

The broadband bandwidth cap is egregiously stupid - it's designed to take broadband services and make sure that you not only can't use them to download Linux CDs, but you can't even use them to download enough couch-potato material to make it worth having bought the service instead of using dialup in the first place. But long before that, I remember friends in Oz in the early 90s trying to convince Telstra that when they wanted an E1, they didn't mean they wanted a bundle of 64kbps B channels that they could use to connect to multiple little sites, they really wanted all 2 Mbps on one fat pipe (or ok, at least 1984 or 1920kbps of it, but one unchannelized fat pipe.)

And even today, it seems to be difficult to order an E1 access line without having to pay usage charges on it - the point of buying a dedicated piece of wire with no machinery needed in the middle is so you don't have to do that. And this isn't even going deep outback to Alice Springs or something, this is just downtown Sydney, a few kilometers away, where 25% of the country lives. Arrrgh!

MAPS Blocking Netcom Years ago

[billstewart]

Back when the MAPS Open Relay Blackhole List stuff was new, they blacklisted Netcom, which was my ISP (I forget it they were still Netcom or if they'd been eaten by Mindspring or Earthlink by then.) I found out about it when some of my email started bouncing, but at least the MAPS blocking produced human-readable error messages, which was one of the main objectives of the blacklist.

It worked - there was lots of yelling and screaming, but in a month or so Netcom had closed their open email relays and gotten off the blacklist, and it got everybody's attention. In the meantime, I did what I had to do to get my email out, which was to use a different open mail relay at Netcom that the MAPS RBL hadn't noticed :-)

Anti-Competitive Behavior

[Harry8]

Telstra are not loved in Australia.
However their Broadband service "Big Pond Advance" has been heavily promoted of late and is taking market share from AOL's dial up service. As are the ADSL providers. Fast is good, by the time you factor in local calls, the difference in cost for many is minimal.

AOL blocks all DSL ISP's and Telstra.
"Don't go elsewhere kids, you won't be able to email your mates on AOL anymore the world over."

Where are the watchdogs? Why shouldn't AOL be instructed to lift this rediculous practice or withdraw entirely from Australia.

(It's a great business move if they get away with it... Remember a little company called Microsoft?)

There is plenty of good competition for telstra

[wadiwood]

But maybe the competition don't spend as much on marketing. I find that bigpond is taken up by people who don't do any research of their own about the best ISP for them.

On the other hand Telstra is still choking the broadband adsl market all by itself. It is getting more difficult for it to get away with that. Everyone has to go thru Telstra one way or another for ADSL, but nearly every other ISP still manages to offer a better deal and better service even though they have to purchase thru Telstra. Except the ISPs with worse management than Telstra.

When my friends ask me who to sign up with I won't let them sign up with Telstra. Or Optus.

Look for the geeks running ISPs, who have just enough sense to hire a business manager to make sure they cover their costs. These guys aren't solely profit motivated, they have a great understanding of the technology and always keep up. Stay clear of the corporate monsters, or entrepreneur types, who don't care about anything except separating customers from their money. Service? what is that?.

My current favourite is internode.com.au. I also like adam.com.au although they're adelaide based. I like Goldweb in Canberra. iinet.com.au and ihug.com.au seem to be ok but I'd need to check a bit more. ihug seems a little secretive but iinet have the right kind of history. And yes I've been burned by isp mergers like dynamite.com.au -> eisa -> austar, thats why you have to steer clear of the entrepreneurs.