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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.""
SMTP email was nice while it lasted.
Semaphore, anyone? Smoke signals?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
..the spammers to get AT&T to whitelist their IPs?
is a few span servers to get on the list, and a few legit servers to get hacked and taken off the list (and tries to get on again) before there will be hell and ATT would have to abandon the plan, wasting all these time and resources used to instate this plan in the first place.
Great shame, really...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I had an "unpublished" landline phone number, and chose a third-party carrier for my long distance service. AT&T called me every week as long as I had that phone line, trying to sell me long distance service, no matter that every time I called, I said "no" and told them to never call again.
It seems that AT&T thinks that if you don't want to do business with them, then they automatically deserve to be on your whitelist.
Voice spam is just as bad as email spam. Even worse, since you can't deal with it on YOUR time.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
On the other hand, there are other approaches just as destructive.
I run an outbound SMTP server for my own personal use, in part because my ISP's SMTP server sucks.
At times, it could take 30 or more minutes to relay an email to myself.
One of the problems with this is that apparently I got listed on some kind of dial-up user block list, and my mother's ISP blocks those users from sending to its users.
The downside is that my mother's ISP also blocks my ISP's SMTP server.
Isn't that useful.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
This can't be right... Most businesses have no idea what an IP address is, let alone the IP addresses of people who send them email... It sounds like an utterly stupid plan. What's to stop spammers sending them IP addresses of their mail sending boxes or open relays?
I wonder how the people on AT&T's ISP networks are going to feel about not being able to communicate with mom and dad in Singapore? And all those folks (or those few folks, I suppose, depending on who you hang with) running personal SMTP services from their homes for the added privacy it buys them.
Yes, there's a lot of trash spam out there. It's NOT impossible to stop, but solutions like this one are not going to substantially help. If AT&T closes off its mail network to the world outside, those broadband customers running open proxies just become that much more valuable - then ATs own customers become the conduit of the spam they are trying to squash. There are thousands of "questionable" usenet posts that originate from roadrunner and AT&T and pacbell and earthlink usenet servers that are proxied there through their own broadband customers. Even locking those customers down to port 80 access won't stop trojans and backdoors, so logically I guess this is just the first step to AT&T closing off its network from the internet entirely?
Maybe they'll just firewall all their customers in and dish out the DMCA approved web pages through proxy farms... that'll teach those evil spammers!
I'm oversee an it department. While we're lucky enough to have a highly technical user base there are still users that need a little help. And some of them will have to write at&t.
"Solutions" like this do little to stem the tide of spam, they only shift the burden to others. Now, in order to ensure that my users can send email to the customers and contacts they need at att&t, I have to keep them up to date with our whereabouts on the net?
Earlier this year we had to deal with a spat of denied messages cause when a number of large organizations blocked our entire address block because they believed it was a DSL block. This was the only reason. Not that spam originated from any of these addresses,
The only way to stop spam is to stop the spammers. The only way to stop the spammers is to stop those that pay them or otherwise make money trough the spam.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
This is really a lose-lose situation and it's disappointing to see this. If there's going to be a concept of trusted mail servers, we need to use a technological solution that allows easy, open, and transferable trusted participation in the network - maybe for once an application where a web-of-trust would actually function. Even the current system with centralized, subscription-based blackhole lists is far better - at least you only have 5-10 different places to go if you end up on somebody's shit list.
In the dark world of the future you'll have to fight your way through bureaucracy and stupid sysadmins (and yes, the vast majority of sysadmins are fucking idiots, though I know that's not a popular opinion around here) for each and every company, organization or domain you want to send email to. That sounds like an infeasible, unmaintainable system to me.
Personally, I find the spam filtering on my fastmail (www.fastmail.fm) account to be incredibly reliable and effective, and I've found that if I bounce back every piece of true spam I get, over a few weeks or months, my rate of incoming spam seems to decrease substantially. We can do better, and we will beat the spammers, but we don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
But, if you wish to become an ATT customer, how do you contact them?
I have no wish to phone them so they can get my phone number, which they will use to call me every 5 days trying to get me to switch my ld to att.
A week ago I decided that it would be interesting to setup my own mail server, hell, fun even. Interesting yes, fun no. I started with sendmail and ended up with qmail.
m l?tid=120).
I was so proud of my new server, it was so, well, new. I go to send out a test mail and alas earthlink would not accept it, hmm. Then I sent one to my yahoo account, nope. Hotmail? You guessed it. What's the deal I asked. Googled a bit, found that slashdot discussion (http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/04/13/2215207.sht
I started to realize that email is no longer a tool of the little guy. I send my mail through my earthlink server which works but now I must watch my volume (no mailing lists hosted here I'm afraid) because of my 'terms-of-service'. Something about being a little guy or something like that.
Now the last barrier is up. I wonder if ATT would put me on their list?
I have my own domain and run a MTA on my Linux box that is on DSL and gets its IP via DHCP. The IP almost never changes since the server is always on. I bet this is the same configuration as other
Anyway, I am starting to get bounces from certain organizations (AOL, Primus) that seem to think my messages are spam. Seems to have something to do with coming from an IP that is known DHCP. This kind of sucks; whitelists and spam filters may seem good at first, but they are screening out some legitimate traffic.
Even if they did come up with a complete and accurate list of non-spammer mailservers, they still need a way to continiously update it. What would they want? Everyone in the world sending them email whenever a mailserver comes or goes? (oops, no... because the new server wouldn't be on the list either.)
AT&T cannot be this stupid. I have to think that this is a hoax. The long message vouching for the credibility of the earlier, terse message supports this idea.
Why not use the MX?
In large mta deployments the mx is hardly ever the sending mta.
The best dual boot problem solver is; dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda1 ..then cfdisk /dev/hda1 etc..
:-( too bad I have my wife won't switch yet. I have always wanted to use that command!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I've been told that some spammers-for-hire get paid by the response.
If you complain or try to "unsubscribe", that counts as a response and increases their fee.
I know that technically they're still coming in, but I went from 30-40 spams a day in my inbox to 0.
How'd you sign up for slashdot?
So why don't you just block outbound access to port 25 on your routers? Not exactly rocket science...
Couldn't ATT scan their current email base for this same info? Sure it's going to take 1+ sets of human eyes to make sure an IP is legit but that's going to be needed anyhow to review the incoming requests to be added to the whitelist.
3 21 78-2003Oct15.html
Lets take this one step further. Six months down the road I, a future customer, business partner or supplier to ATT whom has never heard of this policy, send them some email wanting LD service for Humongous Corp, to supply widgets at half their current cost or whatever and has its mail bounce or go unanswered. ATT is the big loser. Must be nice to be a company that has no need for additional customers or suppliers.
More info on the deep thinkers at ATT and other big businesses can be found in the book "The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth," by Clayton Christensen and
Michael Raynor. A review can be found at the Washington Post here (some non-personal info may be required before reading) (Remove obligtory Slashdot Extra Space(TM)):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
A small excerpt:
(The book) offers a funny look back at how AT&T threw away $50 billion in just over a decade on doomed identity changes.
After exiting the local phone market in 1984, AT&T first tried to become a computer company, buying NCR for $7.4 billion only to sell it five years later at roughly half price. Next it entered the cell-phone market by acquiring McCaw Cellular for $11.6 billion and sinking $15 billion more into improvements. But when AT&T spun off its wireless business in 2000, the new wireless entity was valued at a mere two-thirds of its investment. Then came the disastrous cable bet: A few years after forking over $112 billion to buy TCI and Media One, AT&T unloaded those assets to Comcast for $72 billion.
Yup, the dinosaur is about dead.
The adminsitrative overhead along of customers/partners/suppliers changing ISPs, moving mail servers, and etc.. will pretty much insure that AT&T mail will NOT be reliable.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
In reading the original message (included at the bottom of the later message), I think that this has nothing to do with inbound spam. Instead, I believe that AT&T is about to block its clients from accessing port 25 on servers other than those in a defined list.
This doesn't address the problem of AT&T users receiving spam (except indirectly). Instead, it is addressing the problem of AT&T users sending spam. More likely, this is addressing the problem of poorly configured and virus-infected machines belonging to AT&T clients being used as relays of spam.
This is likely in response to the "stealth spamming" that's becoming more popular: hijacking machines via virus for use as SMTP relay, DNS server, and web server. [For those interested, there's been a fair bit of NANOG discussion of this recently under the subject of "Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojanedboxes".]
What it did was affect whether or not mail you sent to joe.random.employee@att.com got heavy spam filtering (on the mail servers that were getting pounded to death and might lose mail) or whether you got sent to one of the servers that did less spam filtering and wasn't getting pounded.
So even if a few spammers got themselves whitelisted, that wouldn't be a big problem because the filtering can handle them (plus they'd be coming from known IP addresses which could be blocked or de-whitelisted). But for some customers who are ISPs or email providers, it's a lot tougher to do the job right - they'd really want to
- permit email from sysadmin@bigisp.example.net to wholesale-fiber-sales@att.com
- deny forged email pretending to be from got.viagra@bigisp.example.net that really came from some hijacked Korean relay
- do some filtering on email from joe-random-user@bigisp.example.net to random-employee@att.com
and it's hard to do that really well.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks