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AT&T Moves Toward Mail-Server Whitelist

Posted by timothy on from the is-it-better-than-spam dept.

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.""

5 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All it takes by HBI · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The servers will be now identified by customer.

    The incoming spam will then have an owner tied to it, who will be held accountable. It's a very workable system actually and not as prone to failure as you are alluding.

    --
    HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  2. Users don't know what to do with this . . . by actappan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. This is just wrong in so many ways... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Insightful
    So if each big company decides to do this, they will all end up with slightly different lists of whitelisted SMTP servers. The Internet will degenerate into a fragmented, unreliable system where you never know who will receive your email. In fact, you'll be strong armed into using particular ISPs and using email addresses like shithead@att.net in order to get your email through to anybody. The Internet is thereby de-democratized and rolled back 10 years.


    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.

  4. Some much for my mail server by mgarriss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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.shtm l?tid=120).

    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?

  5. RTFA? by fo0bar · · Score: 5, Informative

    FYI, this seems to be from AT&T Business Services, IE backbone and ip operations. So their customers (the people they are asking) in this case are other ISPs, datacenters, etc, and the whitelist is for sending email to AT&T itself. This has nothing to do with other AT&T services (remember, "AT&T" is essentially about a hundred different companies that happen to share the same name), so this should not affect some grandma trying to send to an attbi account. That being said, whether what they're doing is good remains to be seen.

    (Interestingly enough, I *DO* work for a datacenter that has IP and transit services through AT&T, and have not received one of these emails yet...)