AT&T Moves Toward Mail-Server Whitelist

Gunfighter writes "In an apparent attempt to quelch the amount of incoming spam, AT&T has asked their customers, partners, and business clients to provide them with IP addresses of their mail servers. All other mail will be discarded. To quote the message: "... In order to continue to allow email to AT&T you need to provide the IP addresses of all your outbound email gateways. If you do not respond immediately, your access may not continue.""

Comments

Re:All it takes

[seanadams.com]

The solution is pay-per-mail. I set my price at $1 per email. The charge is forgiven if I reply. You spam me at your expense - I'll happily accept the $100 per day.

The original memo

[morelife]

I read between the lines as:

Greetings Customers and Partners,

There is too spam, so we fired everyone in IT. We've got some temps, led by secretaries, who will now rebuild and maintain all AT+T messaging platforms. Please send your IP addresses as we will need to ping you next week to see if you're still a Parntner/Customer.

Best regards,

"

Re:The original memo

[Anonymous Coward]

I read between the lines as:

Greetings Customers and Partners,

There is too spam, so we fired everyone in IT. We've got some temps, led by secretaries, who will now rebuild and maintain all AT+T messaging platforms. Please send your IP addresses as we will need to ping you next week to see if you're still a Parntner/Customer.

Best regards,

"

Replace the temps and secretaries with cheap Indian labor and you probably got it right.

Re:Somehow ...

[Rick the Red]

You must be a spammer. That's the ONLY way your SMTP server could get blacklisted. Oh, and your ISP must harbor spammers, too, otherwise there's NO WAY they could be on some blacklist by mistake. OH, NO, the spam vigilanties NEVER make mistakes and blacklist an innocent party. NEVER.

Really, never. Just ask them.

Re:All it takes

[l810c]

And what the recourse for the Customer? Call or email the ISP to get xxx.com on their whitelist?

Here's some samples:
'I just signed up for fatanalhos.com and they emailed me my password. I didn't get the email. Could you please put fatanalhos.com on your Whitelist?'

'I just ordered some penis enlargement cream, but I didn't get my email conformation. Could you please Whitelist myphatcock.com?'

'I'm expecting a large sum of money from Nigeria and I can't get my emails...'

I've got a great IP they can block

[Sir Haxalot]

127.0.0.1

Re:This is just wrong in so many ways...

[jred]

Slashdotted? :)

Re:All it takes

[KindAloysiusX]

I don't think this scheme is scalable. What if you and I want to have a conversation? Do we have to exchange mail forever?

abuse@att

[Anonymous Coward]

From: MAILER-DAEMON@dontspam.com
To: complainer@dontspam.com
Subject: failure notice

I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

abuse@att.com:
12.20.58.70 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Your IP is banned and we do accept spam
from you, please contact AT&T by phone for assistance.

--- Below this line is a copy of your message.

Return-Path: complainer@dontspam.com
From: complainer@dontspam.com
To: abuse@att.com
Subject: SPAM COMPLAINT
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 06:14:35 +0000

Dear Sir/Madam,

Attached is a spam message which appears to be sent from
IP addresses allocated to your company. We have received
over 1,000 of these messages in the past week.

Please take action and stop spamming our site immediately!

The Postmaster.

----- Original Message -----

Received: from mail.bogus.com ([211.110.179.73])
From: "haggett" 02yrpelaf@thredrkinet.net
To:psmith@dontspam.com, fbloggs@dontspam.com,
tjones@dontspam.com, abuse@dontspam.com,
postmaster@dontspam.com, everyone@dontspam.com
Subject: ~do not overpay for calls LWEK
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 01:13:20 -0400
X-Mailer: Bulk Super Mailer v2.1a

PaYiNg ToO MuCh 4 LONG DISTANCE PHONE CALLS? AT&T
CAN SAVE YOU **BIG** MONEY. CALL NOW, DON'T DELAY.

This is a one time mailer and you do not need to unsubscribe.

DISCLAIMER: This E-mail is not SPAM under the Federal Regulatory
laws of the United States. This message is being sent to you in
compliance with the proposed Federal Legislation for commercial
e-mail (H.R.4176-SECTION 101 PARAGRAPH (e) (1) (A)) and Bill
s.1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th US Congress.

If you have received this email by error, we sincerely apologize
for any inconvenience.

Re:So what's to prevent..

[swordboy]

"Hey, smtp.xyz.com wants to exchange mail with me, but I've never heard of him. Do you know him? Do you trust him?"

Its a mail server... not a male server...

Re:Bah, obviously there is a better approach

[CowboyMeal]

Alright "sql rob", how about hooking them up to a third um... "DB" machine of some sort?

Back to UUCP

[Avardan]

Heh, glad I still remember how to configure uucp. I'll just teach my mom and close friends how to use it and we'll have spam-free email courtesy of Ma Bell! /flex

AT&T is pathetic

[gwhalin]

Yeah, this sounds like a great idea. I am beginning to believe that AT&T's net ops dept is filled with idiots. My office is subletting space off of another company and using their AT&T business DSL. Roughly 2-3 months ago, all ICMP out of our network stopped. So, I get on the phone with AT&T. After a lot of getting bounced around to higher and higher support people, I finally get a hold of someone who tells me that AT&T is now blocking all ICMP across their network "for security purposes". Brilliant. It is not as if ICMP is a useful protocol or anything. So much for any remote monitoring of our servers with a simple ping. So much for using traceroute or ping to debug simple network problems. Now they are intending to break SMTP. Seems that by 2006 AT&T will have blocked most all Internet protocols because they are "insecure". Can't wait until the brains at AT&T decide to block TCP/IP!