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FTC vs. Open SMTP Relays
HighOrbit writes "Cnet reports on news.com.com that The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, several state Attorneys General, and Australia, Canada and Japan are sending this letter (pdf) to operators of open relay mail servers to educate them on the dangers of open relays and how they help spread spam. Although the letter does not threaten direct law enforcement action, it does let open relayers know that they have been noticed and warned. The threat of being blacklisted has not worked yet, so will this finally convince mail server admins to shut down those open relays?"
How am I supposed to find out about herbal viagra, hot co-eds, batteryless flashlights or stainless steel if this succeeds?
I'm going to write my Member of Parliament about this.
Trolling is a art,
I'm thinking most of these letters will be filed in the round bin.
50% of the people recieving the letter will be the wrong person and not have a clue what it is.
10% will read it and panic, but ultimately it won't get to the sysadmin and nothing will change
20% will have some obscure reasons for using open relays
and 20% of all statistics are made up as they are typed.
Gibble: Descriptive of an emotional state in which one's mind is scrabbling for some purchase on reality
This just means I don't have to test all my servers. Someone will let me know. Man, andministrating my home network just got easier!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
I agree, it's a terrible waste of paper. I think instead the FTC should send out mass e-mails about this and... uh.... wait a minute...
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I'm really glad to see the Texas seal on this document. It's really disturbed me to see Texas just standing by and ignoring the spam problem. I personally think any spammers caught in-state should be roped and dragged to the middle town to let the people decide what to do with them. We're already proud to be #1 in executions, cowboy justice would just up our position.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
"so will this finally convince mail server admins to shut down those open relays"
I've been convinced for a while... I just haven't figured out the sendmail config syntax yet
R$* . $| $* $: $1 $| $2
R$*.dialup.$* $| DIALUP $@ DIALUP
Rdialup.$* $| DIALUP $@ DIALUP
R$* $| $* $: $(Spam $1 $:NOMATCH $| $1 $) $| $2
RNOMATCH $| $+ . $* $| $* $: $>lookat_domain $2 $| $3
R$* $| $* $@ $>comp_value $1 $| $2
"R$". What The ????
The FTC should send their PDF letter to postmaster@<open-relay-host>. However, it may get lost with all the spam flowing through there, so the FTC should send many copies over and over and over and over again to that host. Now, the FTC may not have the resources to send all that email, so that's where you, Joe Netizen, can help out. Send copies of the FTC PDF to the open-relay server. It doesn't matter if your emails bounce; just manipulate the sender address to bounce it back to the open-relay server.
Seems to me, this is a simple problem that can be solved very easily. The open relay is a free resource. Good netizens don't use them, so there's just more resources available to the spammer. If the open relay's resources are all tied up receiving and bouncing the FTC PDF, there's just that much less left to the spammer.
Eventually, the owner of the open-relay will get tired of having his machine wedged and will be forced to close it. Problem solved.
Watch, for their next letter, they're going to warn about the dangers of using Microsoft products!
alot of IBM AIX customers are going to get this letter:
Yeah, all 9 of them
If you forward this PDF explaining open relays to all your friends, Bill Gates will give you a dollar for every closed relay the PDF goes through.
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All of whose base are belong to the what-now?