Slashdot Mirror
SPEWS Adds DSL Reports to Block List
Kylow writes "Last year, Slashdot publicized our efforts at DSL Reports to pursue a group of spammers who had spammed our forums. The Slashdot community immediately pitched in to help, and the publicity wiped the sites owned by the spammers off the internet. Fast-forward to today, and the popular yet often draconian block-list SPEWS has added DSL Reports to their blocklist due to the activities of other websites hosted on NAC.net. DSL Reports users are less than happy. This is hardly the first time SPEWS has been accused of going too far."
Is that it swats flies with sledghammers. Surely there's a more elegant way to deal with this issue now?
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
If your ISP is also providing spam services to spammers, do you really want to be grouped in with them?
I think the black girl behind me at the screening of The Ring said it best. "Get the fuck out of there!"
Everyone loses when you patronize businesses who willingly accept spammers. Don't give them your money. Do it and feel good about yourself and for the good of your subscribers.
I have been pwned because my
I can't tell you how much we hate spews, this is far from a common occurrence and it seems that the only to fight this is to not use spews. Their are plenty of better alternatives like spamcop and orb.
Hmmm... Pie...
But, from the SPEWS FAQ, The Level 2 list
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
from openrbl.org
SPEWS/spews.org: 209.123.109/24: 553 SPEWS2 [2] nac, see http://spews.org/ask.cgi?S2814
from the SPEWS FAQ
Q22: What is Level 2?
A22: This includes all of Level 1, plus anyone who is spam-friendly, supporting spammers, or highly suspicious, but not blatant enough to be included in the Level 1 list yet. If it becomes obvious that someone at Level 2 has become a real problem, they will be escalated to Level 1 after some attempt at education. The Level 2 list will have some inadvertent blocking (non-spammer IP addresses listed), but can still be used by small ISPs or individuals who want a stricter level of blocking/filtering. By having a two tiered list, you can make the hardcore spamfighters happy; those who want to block first and ask questions later. Also, a listing in the Level 2 list may exert a bit of pressure on spam friendly sites and may keep them from turning totally bad - but that is not really the point, stopping spam is. (note: a Level value of "0" means that area is not listed)
From the linked forum posts:
1) your mail server is NOT BlackListed! If you look at the listing it is at level 2 the [2] means level 2. Read the SPEWS FAQ. No one blocks on level 2 listings.
Level 2 listings are netblocks which are watched carefully for evidence of abuse, usually because the adjoining netblocks are in use by spammers, and because the provider (NAC in this case) is ignoring complaints about the abuse, or is doing nothing to remove the abusers.
2) There is something you CAN do other than rant, which will not do you any good at all; and that is to complain to NAC about their spam-friendly policies. It's NAC's hosting network abusers which is the problem. If the listing is upgraded to level [1] then there will be a problem getting your e-mail out; if this is intollerable, the ONLY solution would be to change providers.
3) If NAC persists (usually for a prolonged period of time) in it's disregard for the rest of the Internet, by allowing our mailboxes to be filled up by their customer's garbage, then many system administrators including myself, will choose to refuse mail from larger and larger portions of NAC's IP-Space, IMHO this is a perfectly reasonable choice. It puts presure on the service provider not to host spammers, something, which in the long run will help stop spam.
Understand, that SPEWS does not block anyone, all they do is make available a list of spam-friendly, and spam-supporting providers. Many systems will choose not to communicate with providers who support spam operations in a direct effort to hurt spammers by denying them access to providers.
Yes I run an ISP, and YES we use SPEWS as one of many BL's we use to eliminate UCE/SPAM from our customer's mailboxes. Spews comes in seccond only to spamhaus.org in it's effectiveness. We receive less than 10 spams/day across a user population of over one thousand. Spews alone is responsible for about 30% of the blocking.
This is a perfect example of why you should never just arbitrarily block email because it comes from an IP on a list. Instead, programs like SpamAssassin are useful because they use blocklists as a factor, one among many, in determining whether to treat a message as "spam".
The problem with RBLs is how people use them. There are actually ISPs who block all email from IP (ranges) in a RBL (even to postmaster or abuse!). That is clearly wrong and lazy.
RBLs should be used as they were intended. As advisory to extra check email against. A good idea is to add RBLs to e.g. spamassasin and assign them a +2 score. Then you can take into account other things, like the headers and body of the email to determine if it actually counts as spam. That works very well. But blocking all email just because it comes from a certain IP on some random RBL is stupid.
The SPEWS level 2 list is pretty agressive, so much so that I can't imagine it being used for blocking by commercial operations of any significant size. Individuals are another matter - do you really want to make a fuss over a few people who don't want to receive your mail?
That being said, netblocks get listed for a reason. SPEWS does a pretty good job at providing a history of abuse. If this proves to be true, then you should choose a different provider - I wouldn't want my money going to someone supportive of spam operations.
- dslreports.com has address 209.123.109.175. That address only appears in a level 2 listing. Very few people use level 2 listings, the "real" SPEWS are the level 1 addresses. What level 2 really means, is explained in their FAQ (Q22).
- SPEWS did not add dslreports.com to their blacklist (search the linked page for dslreports, it's not mentioned). This does not make it less annoying for the owners of dslreports.com obviously, but there are differences. E.g., if a spammers moves, the blacklisting will be moved too, for dslreports.com it obviously wouldn't (no, that doesn't mean I think dslreports should simply move and shut up, I know things like that cost money).
- The blacklist that SPEWS publishes is an *opinion*. Everyone is free to follow their opinion or not and use it to (over-)protect their property or not. If an ISP uses it (or any other blacklist) and doesn't clearly inform its customers about that fact, then this ISP is at fault.
Nevertheless, I completely agree it's sad that the spammer situation has gotten so much out of hand that people resort to this kind of carpet-blacklisting to try to force ISP's to stop their spam support (as larger ip-blocks are only added when an ISP refuses to remove its spammers, or starts moving them around to non-blacklisted IP-addresses).It's however pretty much the last resort that other people have to do anything about it. If an ISP does not experience any significant harm from hosting spammers (and in facts profits largely from it) and does not want to remove them because it's the right thing to do, what else can you do to tell the ISP to FOAD if you don't want to become a vigilante?
(putting on asbestos suit)
Donate free food here
I actually think blocking the wider IP ranges of the ISP is a positive thing, and I'm sysadmin for one, and I've been involved in a similar dispute in the past with SPEWS. To be fair in our case we were actually caught in the collateral damage and weren't even hosting the spammer in question.
The point is, blocking a sizeable portion of the ISPs IP range inconveniences them and their non-spammy customers. It encourages them (if nothing else) to take responsibility instead of going for the cheap buck. If blocking wide-ranging ISP IP ranges means that they wake up and stop hosting spammers (or implement stricter controls) then surely that's a good thing in the grand scheme of things.
I see lots of comments in the forum like 'spews blocked my server'. Spews did no such thing. Spews is listing their provider. That's what spews does. They list providers. Spam friendly providers.
When your provider is listed by spews, it's time to move away. You are supporting your provider, which is supporting spammers.
When legitimate customers move away, providers will feel that supporting spam costs them real money. They will figure it out sooner or later: the community hates spam. Really, really hates it. And the community will hate you for not hating spam.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
One spammer buys a few IPs on a block with an ISP, and SPEWS takes out the entire block.
You don't know what you're talking about. As long as the ISP acts to terminate spammers in a reasonable fashion, they don't get listed in SPEWS. It's only after several months of protecting a spammer that an ISP gets added to the block.
I can't believe what I'm reading on this site today! Targetted advertising or so called "Spam" is a commercial venture that goes to the very heart of a great American capitalist tradition. IT IS YOUR DUTY AS A GOOD CITIZEN TO READ ALL THE SPAM IN YOUR INBOX.
The cold war may be over, but does the term "Economic downturn" mean anything to you? We need Americans to buy herbal remedies (many of which are extraordinarily effective) and penis extenders, to consume, consume, consume before our great country becomes yet another footnote in some future history book, PROBABLY SCRAWLED IN SOME CHINESE PICTOGRAM. Is that what you want? DO YOU? ANSWER ME??
Support your country. Reject communism. Read spam.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Make sure that you understand what the list is meant for, and how aggressive the list is. Some lists tell you right off of the bat that they should be used for experimental or reference purposes only, and shouldn't be used in a production environment. Talk to friends and colleagues, reference newsgroups. Start small, and see how effective your beginning measures are before increasing your efforts. Your customers and/or company depend on email, and I have seen too much legimate traffic blocked by aggressive lists being used without proper research beforehand.
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
-- Nil of Broadband Reports
Them sounds like fighting words to me!
Actually, this part is incorrect. Spews (and several other blacklist providers) don't even bother to notify the ISP before listing (or after for that matter).
SPEWS as an organization does not send mail, however the people who are behind SPEWS DO send LARTs to the responsible hosting providers for the spams that they receive. They just don't identify themselves as SPEWS when they do it. This is so that ISPs will either learn to take ALL complaints seriously (because they can never know when one of the complaints comes from someone at SPEWS) or learn to enjoy their new intranet.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Well this is strange, it's not like they've been added though, that's a bit of a mis-truth as NAC.net have been in SPEWS for a long time.
:) (Plus the whole damn Data Centre is in there)
Security Forums are also hosted in NAC.net so we are also 'SPEWed' which is a pain as it means anyone using an Outblaze related service doesn't get their sign up e-mail and their account will stay inactive. There is nothing you can do to get out of SPEWS, you can just moan about it
We got around the problem by relaying all of our mail through another SMTP server run by a friend at an unamed ISP.
We didn't report this though as we didn't really think it was slashdot worthy news.
From what I have gathered, the SPEWS philosophy isn't just indifference to collateral damage (ie, 'civilian casualties'); they actively do this damage in order to try to force ISPs into changing their habits. And they are extremely difficult to both reach and reason with; you can post on a newsgroup and hope someone pays attention to your pleas.
I don't know if the actual newsgroup replies come from people who make decisions with SPEWS, but those replies are amazingly hostile. "Oh, you're blocked? That's because you're on a crummy ISP that allows spammers. You're on a contract and can't switch? Well, you'd better start calling your ISP, because the block on your addresses isn't going away until the spammer adjacent to you does, and maybe not then, because you're a whiner."
(ok, ok, that last part was a bit of hyperbole, but it's not that far off... check dejanews!)
Admittedly, they're not killing anyone, but the tactic of deliberately attacking people who are only tangentially related to your real target is often called 'terrorism'. The consequences here are far less serious, but the fundamental tactic remains the same.... someone is doing something you don't like, and so you hurt a whole lot of people to try to force them to stop. So I don't use SPEWS.
There are a number of other, much saner, blocklists available, and the advent of Bayesian filtering is a VERY big deal. I am personally using a combination of postfix, maildrop, SpamAssassin and bogofilter, and I get amazing results; I only started training about two weeks ago, and the spam I have to deal with has dropped by over 99%. I get 1 or 2 false negatives per day, and I have had only one false positive since I started using this system. It does take a little maintenance, but it's much less annoying and intrusive than the constant attention digging through spam takes.
It is possible, in other words, to do an exceptional job of stopping spam without contributing to a form of terrorism.
WaterKeeper.ca, the site for the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper (part of Robert F. Kennedy's Waterkeeper Alliance) had the same problem, but with SORBS. WaterKeeper.ca is hosted on a server at a hosting company, shared by many other customers. The problem is, one or more of the other customers were allegedly sending spam messages, and SORBS blacklisted the whole box, leaving Lake Ontario Waterkeeper unable to communicate with many people who depend on their newsletters to keep up to date with environmental battles they are fighting.
Since 1996, I've been involved with running SMTP servers in some capacity, and I've always felt that the real-time blacklist services, while good intentioned, are a poor way to deal with the problem of SPAM. Too often, legitimate organizations get blacklisted because a few (and sometimes, only one) twit(s) forget that they've opted in to something and decide to report a message as spam. We're not talking about someone or some organization buying a mailing list here, either. In 100% of the circumstances that I've been involved with where someone has been blacklisted by an RBL, the messages that triggered the "spam" complaints have been totally opt-in newsletters - the people sending the messages haven't purchased their mailing lists, but instead, compiled them by having the users -specifically- request the content.
What makes things worse is that SORBS, for example, requests a "donation" to a charity in order to have you removed from their list. To me, that borders on extortion.
What makes it even worse still is that with SORBS blacklisting the whole box, all the other legitimate use e-mails being sent from that machine to SORBS-enabled mail servers are left out of luck. It's one thing to punish -one- "spammer", but with hosting companies as popular as they are, blacklisting an IP sometimes blacklists dozens (or even hundreds) of customers at a time, all sharing the same server. Suddenly, many people sharing a server have a problem, because one person was "spamming" and the RBL's are far too wide a net to cast over that single offender as they try to deal with the problem. When does the "service" they provide become a disservice because of the collateral damage it causes?
It's high time we abandon the clearly flawed RBL concept (and any other technological forms of dealing with spam) and start -really- putting pressure on our elected officials to enact sufficiently strong anti-spam legislation. Consider that many forms of copy protection and DRM have been cracked, replaced or upgraded, then cracked again... and you see that where there is a will, there is a way. Everytime we suceed in blocking spam by some means, it takes little time for the spammers to find another way to get their junk into our inboxes.
Not until we make spam a significantly expensive proposition (in the form of fines - I personally would love to see chronic spammers tarred and feathered, but I digress), will the "internet marketing" companies finally be stopped from flooding my mailbox with their messages.
Clearly, there are issues of jurisdiction standing in the way of this... but in my opinion, if copyright laws can be shared and upheld through a multi-national treaty, why can't a similar anti-spam treaty exist?
Now, I should point out that the unrealistic elitist in me remembers when spam didn't really exist, because not everyone and their grandmother had decided to rape the internet so that they could make a quick buck. Spam just reminds me - hundreds of times a day - that for all things good in the world, humanity finds a way to take advantage of it, use it until it's ruined, then move on to the next thing... you know... kind of like what 2nd wave style industry (to reference Toffler) is doing with our planet. Spam is just the next form of pollution that
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
http://www.ifn.net/classic/rblstory.htm covers SPEWS in detail (i don't agree with all of it, but it is pretty spot on).
but you are sure to find lots more on http://www.google.com/search?q=spam+hate+spews.
Notice how it seems to be mostly innocent people complaining about SPEWS and the way it operates?
I hate spam just like the next guy, so I would recommend the wonderful Spamassassin and use it with Spamcop.
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
SPEWS stands for Spam Prevention Early Warning System. Level 2 is that early warning - which gives listed ISPs a chance to take action before they get moved to level 1. Including the ISP's netblock is necessary because spam-friendly ISPs will relocate their high-paying spammer customers to different IP addresses in order to frustrate single IP-address blocks. Also, if one spammer is tolerated with an ISP, you can count on several others joining up - so a netblock listing pre-empts this.
Sure, maybe. But it's called a "slippery slope." SPEWS is in a position to add a block against anyone for any reason -- that they don't is beside the point, they apparently owe nobody a duty of care to ensure only the "bad people" are blacklisted.
In fact, they actively support blocking whole netblocks so that innocent people will be affected and (hopefully) take action.
They're vigilantes and thugs, and, they break the trust the email system is founded upon.
Those scumbags forward spam complaints to spammers, tell people reporting spam to "get a life", and generally abuse anyone who dares to say anything about thier spammers.
I don't think the SPEWS listing is going to make a big difference. All of NAC.net has been locally blocked on my domain for over a year now, and they're going to stay there until the heat death of the universe or Windows XP is released under the GPL, whichever comes first.
If DSL Reports doesn't like it, they need to get themselves a provider that has the first clue on how to run an ISP.
First thing, it doesn't seem as if they are blacklisted yet, only that their IP-block is on some sort of warning level before being blacklisted if their ISP doesn't do anything about spammers.
Secondly, I don't understand why people blame SPEWS. All SPEWS does is provide a list of what they think a black-list should be. They are not forcing anyone to use it. They are not a government body or even a standards organisation. They are not trying to trick anyone with false promises or advertising a dangerous product. Obviously the people who are using it agree with its philosophies (ie. collateral damage) and believe that the false positives are worth it to get rid of the spam. ISPs that implement it are businesses first and formost. If they were losing more customers due to complaints about false positives than to complaints about spam they would have disabled it ages ago. As for complaints that SPEWS have too much power, they get the power by people who run ISPs deciding to voluntarily and of their own free will give it to them. They don't dictate terms to anyone, they don't force anyone to use their blacklists. SPEWS is a symptom of the problem not the cause. Just like fevers and boils are often the body's attempt to get rid of the disease. Mighty inconvient but useful. The cause is spammers and ISPs that support them. Managing to wipe out SPEWS is like popping smallpox boils. It does nothing to get rid of the disease. The question is whether SPAM is a disease that SPEWS can get rid of or whether the disease is so severe that the fever is useless and the inconvience was all for naught.
I think the issue is that the problem with spam is so huge that any anti-spam action you take is going to cause problems for someone somewhere. No approach is NOT going to cause problems. Legal approaches either seem to legitimise spam or add more government control and often seem to be useless with little teeth anyway. Technical approaches like changes to email protocols seem to be going no-where quickly and take lots of money and inconvience to implement. If people fustrated with the slow technical changes start implementing different protocols we could end with a Balkanisation of email. Making people pay for each email sent will cause big problems with people who legitimately need to send out mailing lists. End user filtering tends to be more complex than the average user likes and doesn't address the problem that the email still costs money to the ISP (and hence to you). Blacklists tend to cause collateral damage. It's like the solution to any major problem - someone somewhere is going to have to give. Either you allow the government exert more control over the internet, you are willing to spend a lot of money fixing the problem technologically or you accept that blacklists are going to cause collateral damage. What are people willing to sacrifice to get rid of spam, because you are going to have to sacrifice something because it is the legal and technical status quo that allows it to happen. Just like if you want to get rid of pollution, you are going to have to sacrifice something because it is our current way of life that causes the massive pollution problems that exist today.
Personally I think the best approach would be for spammers to all get struck by lightning and suffer in the 7 Hells for the rest of eternity but somehow I doubt that will happen.
they apparently owe nobody a duty of care to ensure only the "bad people" are blacklisted.
Of course they do. It's a reputation thing. If they were to list IPs at random, then nobody would use the list. That people do use the list is a sign that they don't act carelessly in listing IPs in there. SPEWS is a little more strict than most lists of this nature, but then some ISPs want that. It's freedom of choice, baby.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I used to poll SPEWS, as I really, really, hate spam.
However we quickly got reports form our users about false positives. While my attitude was "Then your friends should switch ISPs", my users were not happy with that response.
After some discussions, I stopped using SPEWS. I may poll it again as an advisory (i.e. marking, but not blocking messages).
However, currently I am polling the Spamhaus SBL and XBL, and me and the users are very, very happy. The XBL catches loads of spam, and we did not have a single false positive.
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
After a run in last year with SPEWS, and after some investigation, I believe I have found SPEWS owner/administrator, and posted last March as SPEWS no longer anonymous
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
We've tried relaxing it, using smaller netblocks and it DOESN'T PROVIDE ENOUGH INCENTIVE TO WORK. If you get blocked because your ISP's blocked as they're an RFC-ignorant Spamhaus, then you'll take your business elsewhere. If you can't take it elsewhere then you'll shout and maybe change their minds.
No ISPs forced to use SPEWS: if they do, then it's the ISPs servers the spam's clogging up, and their choice to block based on any criteria they want to.
Wonderful piece of software that works quite nicely and for small independent mail servers you will not be disappointed.
http://tmda.net/
In case you don't have this running already, that is.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid. But isnt it entirely possible that 'professional spammers' could set up mail relays under a subnet of highly regarded anti-spam sites?
This would mean that the spammers would get blacklisted, but much to the spammers glee the anti-spam sites (in this case DSL Reports) also gets blacklisted. It has a double effect of the anti-spam site being blacklisted, plus the anti-spam site (DSL Reports et al) owners arguing for the blacklist hosts (SPEWS) to be more lenient.
It wouldnt suprise me if 'professional spammers' were acting this way to protect their own interests.
"Yeah, uh, we put a lot of innocents in jail, but on the bright side we did also put a lot of criminals in jail."
You need to come up with something better.
HAND.
There is a HUGE difference between "False Positive" and "Intentional False Positive".
SPEWS defends their actions by saying that they cannot eliminate all False Positives, and so shouldnt try.
However, that is a lie. SPEWS intentionally blocks legitimate e-mail for the purpose of causing people to complain to their ISPs to the point that their ISPs complain to their provider, to the point that a legitimate customer who is not violating any terms of service is asked to change their practices or move to another region of the country.
Is this effective? Of course not. Certainly, someone who uses the list will not recieve as much spam, as well as blocking much legitimate mail at the same time. But SPEWS is not about blocking Spam, it is about trying to get high-level service providers to violate their contracts.
Any list you use is going to have False-Positives. The difference is that SPEWS does it on purpose.
SPEWS claims that they are innocent, because they don't block anyone. This is a lie. They publish lists which are in turn downloaded by automated scripts and are applied to e-mail servers as filters. They are aware of this. Their lists have no other purpose. Remember when SPEWS blocked everybody, and many automated scripts did the same?
When you publish a list which has no other purpose, then tell people how to configure their servers to automatically download and use the list, you Are blocking people. It's entirely possible for someone to exist who is stupid enough to not see the connection between publishing an IP to a list which is used by many automated servers which you have helped to set up for the purposes of blocking the IPs on the list, and the subsequent blocking of that IP. Those people don't have anything to do with SPEWS, though.
There is more, but I need to head off. I may post again later.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I've recently started submitting data to the Weighted Private Block List project.
Basically, it's an attempt to use statistical filters (eg Bayesian based ones) to identify what IP's are sending spam. I'm sure that they would love to have more people involved in the collection of data, particularly if they've already trained their client side filters to a high level of accuracy.
You're an idiot. SPAM is unsolicited, bulk, commercial e-mail. If you send it out to a list of your customers (who can opt-out, I assume), then it's not SPAM.
Next time, try to form an argument that actually makes sense.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Unfortunately, this solution may not be available to everyone this affects. NAC.net is also our ISP where I work. If this escalates to where NAC is put in SPEWS' "level 1", we may end up with our company emails being dropped. Should the company switch ISPs, possibly breaking contracts?
As far as NAC itself goes... I know of at least one open mail relay controlled by the ISP itself (not some home user with a misconfigured or trojaned box). Granted, it's not listed in their MX records, and you can only use it to send mail to NAC customers, but I personally get enough spam at work through that machine I have added a spamassassin rule specifically to check for that hostname. And complaining to NAC about it a dozen or so times over the past few years has done absolutely nothing. I guess they can only blame themselves for the SPEWS listing. *sigh*
B*B,
-Smoke.
OK, for those of you who read NANAE, this is old news, but for the rest of you...
I'm a sysadmin who worked very hard to get a /24 listed in SPEWS delisted. The netblock was in the list because a customer of ours decided to provide DNS service to a known and notorious spammer. We earned the listing, period. I killed the bastard, reported the fact, and got the listing lowered to a zero, historical. In the process of doing that job, I learned a lot about the whole blocklist thing and realized that even the operators didn't see what they are really doing. They think it's about spam. Wrong.
Follow along with me a moment, and you'll see why I think this way. First, the Internet is, by definition, a "network of networks", a large anarchy run by a very large number of system administrators (greater than 10,000) who make private decisions about who and how they allow to access their bandwidth, systems, and services. The Internet Society and its sub-units provide a forum to publish community notes, the Requests for Comments, which are nothing more and nothing less than agreements for how to play nice in this employee-owned swimming pool.
The Internet community has decided on standards of behavior, and each system operator trusts every other system operator in the pool to conform to the rules of society, and to ensure that the users conform to the community rules -- not unlike CC&Rs in a neighborhood development that form part of the purchase contract of many homes and condominiums. Some operators have become lax in their expected enforcement of the rules on particularly not-nice people, the ones who break the rules in order to win money, or some other benefit. There are enough of these Internet con men out there that the community coined a word to describe them: "spammers."
Back in the NSF days, a lapse in administration resulted in disconnection, quick and swift, so the system adminstrators, up and down the line, toed the line to avoid being banished. In the Commercial Internet that replaced the NSF Internet, personal greed gets in the way of this remedy, and so the disdain of social customs is left largely unpunished by the society.
Just about every system operator who runs a mail service with more than three users has been yammered at by those users: "WE WANT LESS SPAM -- DO SOMETHING." Complaints to ISPs who take spammer money go largely ignored, and appeals "upstream" -- to the connection providers and to the Tier One networks -- have also gone largely ignored. So the small administrators started to implement mail filters and blocks on "spammy" IP addresses in the hopes that they can block the crap and thus appease their users.
Spammers countered by having their providers move them around in IP space, and by using techniques to "get around" the content filters. It's become a war, frankly. First there were keyword filters, and so spammers started to "do things" to their messages, like replace the letter 'o' with the digit '0' -- you've all seen the tricks. Hash identification of bulk messages were thwarted by inserting random nonsense text. Learning filters are poisoned by spammers injecting random words. And so on and so on. In addition to these content-based counters, spammers also steal resources of innocent people: open mail relays, open proxies, and hijacked Web scripts like formmail.pl, so that the wrong person gets blames for their flood of commercial feces.
What the block-list people decided is that having each of the 10,000 to 100,000 system administrators deal with this individually was eating up too much time, and there was this nifty thing already in place that could be used to reduce the system overhead of id
I am quite surprised that a forum dedicated to broadband telecommunications can't or won't understand hat.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Personally I use a spam filter on my e-mail server, but I use Spamhaus, as my primary, which is a much more professionally run list, they remove listing automatically after 90 days without spam complaints (SPEWs generally only removes you after you beg in the newsgroup), actually have e-mail addresses that you can contact them at, and actually target the spammers nets, not blocking class B networks.
I believe that any admin of an ISP that uses SPEWs is really doing a disservice to their customers, who will have a number of e-mail problems from some very large hosting companies.
Perhaps, though, they should talk to the source of the problem instead of complaining about the solution. The problem, after all, isn't that SPEWS listed a spam source network, but that NAC.net is hosting spammers alongside it's legitimate customers. Those customers should make it clear to NAC.net that either the spammers go, NOW, or they'll take their hosting elsewhere, also now.
Here is a website detailing basically what happens with SPEWS:
http://www.satlug.org/~kjar/spews/
My company has had prety much the exact same experience.
Anyone using SPEWS is either lazy, ignorant, or could care less about the right way to do things.
In other words, just don't use SPEWS. Use ANY list but SPEWS.
This is my sig. The post is over.
Even if you do, finding a new ISP or smarthost is a five minute job
5 minutes? Sure, then contact me, and I'll pay you for 5 minute's work of work to move all of my co-located servers to a new ISP. You have no idea what you're talking about.
And of course there's a variety of other blocklists, all with their own published criteria and standards.
Of course, it would be a bit nicer if the listing of each blocklist on rbls.org contained a <= 10 word summary of the blocklist's policy like the ones you gave, such as "confirmed open relays", "Republic of [South] Korea", or "spam gangs that have been TOSsed thrice for spamming". I've e-mailed my suggestion to the contact address listed on the page.
Beyond that point, it's the ISP's problem.
So if "the ISP" with a problem is the only residential high-speed ISP in the geographic area, what do you expect all the other residential users in that area to do? Move house? Go back to dial-up?
Instead of blocking spammers, just filter out the links they include in e-mails. They can't be obfuscated because they won't work if they are and countless spammers use the same domains to host their affiliate pages and/or ad images.
Block one IP, you block nobody you wanted to because the spammer that sent it doesn't use it anymore. Block one URL and you've just blocked dozens if not hundreds of spams regardless of who's advertising it.
Includes source for automating the process as much as possible
It takes just a few minutes to go through any number of e-mails and remove all the legitimate domains that were linked to and then to update the Mercury Mail rule file.
SPEWS is retarded and counterproductive. IPs are a finite resource and are reused constantly. You cannot realisticly block spammers by blocking IPs. SPEWS has probably done more damage to the internet by it's idiocy than spammers have. It's about time some of the businesses that are being hurt by them form a class action lawsuit. Or, even better, everyone should just stop using them until they pull their heads out of their asses and start being productive instead of just an internet bully.
I found a simple solution that results in getting virtually no spam. And any spam I do get is taken care of on the next update. I have a domain that was getting lots of spams now pointing to a catchall at my home IP. Since I had no legitimate e-mail addresses using that domain it's now a very effective way to preemptivly block links before a spammer tries to use them in a spam sent to one of my real e-mail addresses.
No solution is going to make spam dissappear entirly. The idea is to make it go away as much as possible so it's down to a reasonable level without causing collateral damage. SPEWS has taken the stance to act like an idiot and then blame the ISPs for SPEWS being retarded. There's no excuse or need to block IPs. Especially ones in use by people who have never sent spam.
The best part about blocking links is that the header is meaningless. Every line of it could be forged but if the e-mail contains a link to a blocked domain it will not get through.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Am I missing something here?
Yes. Blocklists can reject the message as the SMTP protocol level. It's possible to literally drop the TCP/IP link before even the first headers gets sent. Any content filter solution (header or body of the email) will require receipt of the full message. At that point, the spammer has already wasted your bandwidth resources, and is now going to waste even more of your CPU resources in filtering it.
The first part of this rant is directed to the admins of BBR. (dslreports is also known as BBR)
I can understand your frustration at being listed and at the "scorched earth policy" of spews. However, there is ample and damning evidence that your isp, nac, is a MASSIVE spam haus
First piece of evidence:
12 sbl listings (with 3 of the really nasty yellow ones) at www.spamhaus.org
Second piece of evidence: the well mentioned spews listing, which has bucko evidence contained inside.
third piece of evidence: 1970 listings found at http://groups.google.com/groups?q=nac.net+group:ne ws.admin.net-abuse.sightings&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&group=news.admin.net-abuse.sightings&sa=G&s coring=d
I think we can all agree, nac has a MASSIVE spam problem and does jack shit about it. So lets move on. BBR obviously doesnt spam, but because you are hosted with a pro spam isp, your being used as human shields by your isp. So what are your options here to get your mail working?
option one: bitch at nac to punt all their spammers, which will cause spews to descalate (yes spews DOES remove entries when spammers are terminated) the listing so your mail doesnt get 550'd. Problem is, nac is likely to not give a shit, and not lift a finger.
option two: smart host your mail with a non spammy isp. There are a variety of ways to do this, and usually its not very expensive. I've leave it up to you (i am sure you guys are fairely clueful in a network sense) on the best way to accomplish this. This is probably the quickest and easiest solution, though the one negative to it is that your still supporting a spam haus, but if that doesnt bother you, then so be it.
option three: the probably least practical solution for you, but morally the best solution. Tell nac to eat shit and die, and move your operations to a non spam haus (and despite what some people are saying, there ARE isps that dont get blacklisted, they agressively nuke any spammer on sight. Spews doesnt list you for one spam, they list you for ignoring repeated spam complaints). On a practical level, i understand this may not be a realistic option for you due to the extreme complexity of moving servers, but i figured i mention it since it is technically possible.
ok, now for my rant directed at the non mail server admins of this forum.
As others has said, spews does NOT directly block your mail.
The mail admin is the one that blocks or doesnt block incoming mail. When he configures the mail server you use, he decides what if any rbls (aka blacklists) he uses. The critera for which rbls he uses depends on management's attitude (assuming its a business server), the admin's stand on spam (is he a rabid block spammers on sight type, or a "screw it, not my inbox or bandwidth" type), and the user base of the server (do the users need to recieve mail from china or south america, or can those countries be blocked with out losing legit mail?).
Spews does not communicate directly with the outside world or provide a method to be communicated with directly for very good reasons. In the past, spammers and spam hauses (verio comes to mind) have sued rbls for completely bullshit reasons. Because spews can and does play hardball with spam hauses, they remain safely anonymous so when spam hauses try to send bullshit lawsuits (aka cartooneys in the anti spam world) to spews; well it doesnt go far when you dont even know who to send the process server to The only way to communicate with spews is by posting on the usenet group NANAE that you've removed the spammers you host. Failure to remove your spammers or lying that you've removed the spammers only gets more and more of your network listed.
People complain about spews listing non spammers along with the spammers. Spews philosophy is similar to the following analogy. Lets say you live in the same apartment complex as the unabomber. People in your town keep getting mail bombs
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Let me modernize those paragraphs for you:
The Internet is, by definition, a "network of networks", a large anarchy owned by corporations who make private economic decisions about who and how they allow to access their bandwidth, systems, and services.
The owners of the networks establish TOS to limit liability and help ensure profitability.
Do you really believe that the techies at the ISPs still have the authority to decide who does or does not remain a customer?
This story fits very well into the "Your Rights Online" category. It's my mail server, and it's my right to decide who can talk to it. As the admin of my mail server, I am participating in a boycott of spam supporting ISPs. It's that simple.
Nobody has "the right" to call me at midnight to sell me stuff, or junk fax me, or bang on my door until I open it. Similarly, nobody has "the right" to put an e-mail into my inbox.
I have to agree with their actions here. This is the sort of 'collateral damage' I agree with. Asking ISPs nicely to clamp down on spammers doesn't work - after all, spammers are customers too. To get an ISP's attention, you have to talk their language: money, and the easiest way to do that is to cause their customers to move elsewhere, and the easiest ( and most defensible ) way to do that is to blacklist IP blocks belonging to the ISP. It's just cold, hard reality. Note that I'm not saying that we have to bomb the Christ out of the ISPs and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent customers and steal their computers ... that would be taking things too far!
The problem is, those notices are sent to the spammer and the ISP, and NOT the innocent bystander who shares the block with the spammer. SPEWS may go to great lengths to work with the spammer, and the ISP hosting them, but they do NOTHING for the innocent bystander. I had our mail server blocked suddenly this way one day; some spammer shared an IP block with us and one day BOOM: all of our clients were having problems with mail because SPEWS decided to list the entire block.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: FUCK SPEWS. I'm 1000x more upset at what they did that one single time than all the upset I have from getting junk mail combined.
Let me put it this way. If anyone went after SPEWS and asked for donations to their legal fund to get them shut-down, I'd be a donor.