Spanish Internet Provider's SMTP traffic Blocked

Andrew D Kirch writes "After being barraged by spam and 419 scams from Rima-TDE and telefonica.es [translated], the AHBL has announced that all of Spain's national ISP's e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service. One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?"

Comments

The future of blocking?

[Animats]

The near future of blocklists may include all of these highly spam-tolerant areas:

• China
• Romania
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Florida

Re:It's not something that'll ever go away

[NSash]

"Blocking off an entire country" is meaningless in this context. You make it sound as if no one in Spain can send e-mail now; that's completely untrue. What has been blacklisted is e-mail originating from Spain's national ISP: that won't affect the Yahoo Mail, or hotmail, or GMail, or any other mail service accounts of people in Spain. Only the accounts provided by Telefonica De Espana, or companies that rely on them for hosting, will be blocked.

This is far less extreme than say, a spam filter that automatically flags email originating from hotmail and aol addresses as spam.

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[Daengbo]

Indeed, my living in Thailand blocks me from many things on the internet:

• Paypal is unusable;
• Many other online ordering service block my whole area;
• I have been unable to find a colo provider with php/mysql that will either accept my payment or allow FTP from SE Asia for their free account;
• Loxinfo (the largest ISP here, I believe) users cannot post to Slashdot stories.

Living in a country that is a home for spam relays, FTP assaults, whatever... makes life much more difficult online, though I do none of this.

Re:Is there such a thing as a reputable blacklist?

[jcam2]

Personally, I've found that many blacklists are getting rather over-zealous lately. For example, one of my ISP's mail servers is on the SpamCop and Dynablock lists, causing pretty much everything I (and many hundreds of thousands of other people) send out to be classified as spam!

Fortunately, I can work around this by relaying mail through a non-blacklisted server, but most subscribers won't have the ability or access to do that. And if the ISP ever turns off port 25, I may have no choice but to relay through their servers :-(

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[rixstep]

I agree all of this can seem damned ugly, but we really have no choice. If some people fly through the roof, let them. The alternative, a legislated and policed Internet, is not an alternative.

And they must succeed, for if they do not, the legal eagles will be here to clean up and then the world will have to go off searching for a new Internet.

The freedom of the Internet is, IMHO, the top priority here. It is the one thing we may never trivialise. We're a fifth column here. The net is powerful - /. is powerful - and if it's legislated and policed, you can kiss most of that goodbye.

So let them let off steam. Let them blacklist all of Spain. After all, Spain should do something. Let Spain work it out. If it does work out, it's not only a victory for anti-spam forces like us, it's a victory for a free Internet.

Tada.

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[hoofie]

Great !!

Perhaps it would also filter out all of the crap about offers for cheap mortgages, cheap medications etc. etc. that are off no interest to me MAINLY BECAUSE I LIVE IN THE U.K.!

Re:incompetence outside of the US?

[@madeus]

I'm a european and the occasional relayed-by-spain spam message doesn't even make the 95% that is relayed by US based machines.

I'm a European too, and I've been getting Spam from Telephonica for 6+ years. Just because you don't understand the reasons behind why this course of action has taken place, doesn't mean it's not warrented, and it certainly doesn't mean you should defend their behavior.

I receive virtually zero spam from US based source IP's and many from telephonica.es - given that the US has *VASTLY* more internet users than the smaller, less well connected Spain is quite damning on Telephonica's part.

Dispite your assertions the US does more than any other nation to prevent and clamp down on spam. Impefect as it is, no comparible level of anti-spam ligitation has been passed in any other nation (though a few sops have been thrown here and there).

Don't assume, measure, balance, and do something about your own country's companies. It could be your neighbour.

I'm from the UK, we do comparibly quite a good job here (dispite poor legislation, largely thanks to the watchful behavior of ISP's), and yes it is one of our neighbours that's reponsible for a very high volume of Spam, that 'neighbour' is Spain.

Telephonica is such a problem child that this is long over due. Many of us (who keep track of the source IP's of our spam) are frankly sick and tired of their **** and it's about time this happened.

You can automatically bash the US all you like (for all the good it will do you), but the problem here is a company in an EU member country pisses of thousands of people all over the world though it's lax and unprofessional business standards, because they are too incompotent to sort out a problem I can recall them having for at least the last 6 years (thanks largely to it's proximity to North Africa and the large number of Cyber Cafe's no doubt).

Go on and black list US IP's if you like, I'd find that amusing. That's actually likley to INCREASE your spam to genuine mail ratio.