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

Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[joeszilagyi]

The message is clear: police your people's usage and abuse of the Internet, or prepare to enjoy your new Intranet.

A few other countries that can use this are found here.

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that is a cool idea!
I don't recieve email from friends in other countries. NEVER. So if a mail service could filter out anything that wasn't comming from the good ol USA, that would we sweet!

Granted I know some places have servers elsewhere, but then the should put some here in the US then shouldn't they?

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:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[LostCluster]

Uh... the site says:

Blackholes.us does not list spammers, spam supporters or vulnerable hosts at the present time. These lists are meant to contain all known networks assigned or allocated to the respective provider or organizations within the respective country. Lists are created for research purposes, primarily, and are made public for any use others see fit.

Really, all they're giving you is a list of IPs assosicated with the named nation or company. If you were to use all of those blacklists at once, you will have blocked out nearly every major hosting firm in the USA, and a good chunk of the world. Not just the spammers, but everything within those ranges. This is definitely a "We can't find the criminals, so we're nuking the town!" defense plan.

These lists are valuable if you want to lock out an entire provider... but realize that you're going to throw out a lot of legitimate servers in your quest to block a few Spammers. Unless you're sure you're never going to have customers in Mexico, don't throw out all of Mexico's IP space in one swipe.

Also, beware that these lists don't sort datacenters from customers. EV1's IP space for example is mostly servers, but they do operate a regional ISP as well. Block that whole range, and some dial-up customers might try to reach you and fail.

Think before you block...

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[kinzillah]

"Blackholes.us does not list spammers, spam supporters or vulnerable hosts at the present time. These lists are meant to contain all known networks assigned or allocated to the respective provider or organizations within the respective country. Lists are created for research purposes, primarily, and are made public for any use others see fit."

It seems the purpose of the site is to list the IP ranges associated with various bodies in the event you should wish to block their traffic.

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:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[aqua]

Chinanet's attitude is utterly hostile. To the extent that one can communicate with them at all (only slightly worse than trying to communicate with any large american ISP, to be fair), they not only don't care, they will defend the spammer ("is not spam") or lie about its origins ("IP in report is wrong.") [quotes here from n.a.n-a.e] Giving them the benefit of the doubt (i.e. that they're not pernicious malevolent cretins and merely have a very different view of right and wrong in this matter), it's still impossible to deal with them on an individual basis. Maybe a government could. Or MSN, or AOL. But until that happens, all of Chinanet's known IP address blocks have a nice shiny DROP rule in my mailservers' firewalls, and any URL to a host in those blocks earns several points for spamassassin to work on.

Unfortunately for this sort of problem, there isn't an email equivalent to a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP). UDPs threatened or applied against major ISPs often tend to produce some meaningful action. Partly it works (to the extent that it does) because Usenet has a replication fabric controllable by a relatively small number of people, whereas email has no such system.

Maybe someone will stage a worm attack in the opposite direction from the usual -- writing a worm to scan the top spam sources lists and spamvertized website lists and DDoS them. It would do little for the problem directly, but it would increase the cost of doing business substantially for Chinanet and their kind. (okay, vigilante justice is usually very bad. But it's a fun fantasy.)

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[4ntifa]

This reminds me of the highly scientific statistical research I did based on spam I receive, most of which originates from USA...

The conclusion of the research:
Americans have small, limp penises.

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[Paulrothrock]

The conclusion of the research: Americans have small, limp penises.

And you Europeans wonder why we drive huge SUVs and build gigantic houses!

Re:Inevitable, and other countries are next.

[weijiao]

This is just egocentric crap! We are frequently blocked because our netblock is a source of spam. The ultimate provider is controlled by a branch of the Chinese government. Like most people here, we have no choice, or influence over our ISP. The logic in the post is therefore fatally flawed. Be aware, that the fastest growing power in IT and related is China. Do you really want to exclude that potential source of business enquiry? If so, it is not surprising that you are exporting your jobs to India and China. Ironically, 99% of the spam I receive is for products whose ultimate source is the USA.

Re:about time

[Narkov]

Bad luck to those ligitimate ISP's out there that get brought down by a few big National ISP's.

Blanket measures like this are wrong. Target the individual ISP's that are known bad.

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

Shoot on sight...

[silentbozo]

You may or may not like blacklists, but you gotta admit, they take their work seriously (from their list of return classifications when querying their blacklist DNS lookup):

Shoot On Sight (Response: 127.0.0.10)
This IP address is listed for one of several reasons. The provider, individual, or company did one of the following:

* Cart00ney threats made towards the AHBL, SOSDG, other blacklists, and spam fighters.
* Attempted and unsuccessful legal attacks against the AHBL, SOSDG, other blacklists, and spam fighters.
* Promotes, supports, or incites attacks against the AHBL, SOSDG, other blacklists, spam fighters, and others on the Internet.

Wait'll someone figures out....

[Anonymous Coward]

...that since most spam originates in the US, the entire country should be blocked.

I, for one, would welcome it, living in the US. Get rid of my spam AND my e-mail. Productivity would go through the roof.

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

[trelanexiph]

not so much a bandaid as a trust metric. It's the equivalent of saying "I am incapable of doing this research, however I will trust persons x y and z to do it, until I say otherwise, I still retain control of my server because I can revoke that trust at any time". However your comment is quite valid, some of them are "self appointed dimwits"

Wonderful

[Neo-Rio-101]

This is amazing really.

All the democratizing functions, promises of free education, free dispersion of information, increased international communication and understanding..... all these things that the internet promised is being brought to it's knees because of penis enlargements, nigerian fraudsters, and greedy marketers all wanting to make a buck!

Don't mod this funny! It's NOT!

(Actually, now that I think of it, TV suffered the same fate. Originally touted as an educational resource, it turned into the junk box it is today. It's just history repeating.)

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.

Blocklists don't block email

[jhunsake]

e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service

Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.

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:Please clarify.

[LostCluster]

Oh, TDE addressing the Spam issues would be great... but the collateral damage of blocking e-mail you want to get is not something you should be taking chances with.

If you have a large number of customers in Spain, and you're configured to use this blacklist... you're screwed. It'll take several hours before you realize why you stopped getting customer e-mails.

Using these blocklists in an automated mode is a very dangerous thing. You never know what collateral group of non-spammers will be blocked next.

Re:about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Poor Richard's Almanac (written by Benjamin Franklin) which went something like this:
When solving a problem it is common to take a method and try it. When it fails, try another. But above all, do something."

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

[_Sprocket_]

You make it sound like no one ever uses their own corporate mail servers? ...
While this may actually induce something to happen, I still feel the cost on the innocents is just too high.

If I were a company who rented IP space from Telefonica De Espana, I'd be upset. They should be able to police their own network. I would have to consider taking my business elsewhere. Or, failing that, seek compensation for the increase in expense of hosting my company email server elsewhere.

The key here is generating a cost to ISPs who harbor spammers. After all, a spammer's fee is certainly incentive to sign them on. Without a counter incentive, we will quickly find ourselves in a classic tragedy of the commons situation.

A final point - email and the Internet in general is a powerfull, valuable resource that exists because various entities work together. When one (or more) entities threaten the workings of that resource, it should be of no suprise that others will decide to no longer work with them.

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

[gujo-odori]

Yeah, that happens pretty regularly where I work, too. We provide inbound and outbound mail service for corporate clients, but do not allow spamming. Nevertheless, it seems like all it takes is one dimbulb somewhere to decide (usually erroneously) that something is spam, and one of our hosts will wind up on the spamcop list. They've really gone around the bend.

There is one blacklist I trust day in and day out, though: ORDB. That's because ORDB will only list confirmed open relays. This is a conservative approach but it means that if a host is listed, there is no question of whether or not it belongs there. Also, there is an automated retest-and-removal system. I can't use ones like SPEWS because even though I mostly sympathize (although I think they are *way* too quick on the trigger), in my business that would block far too much legit mail and we just can't do that.

Re:Internet passports

[maxpublic]

We have real life IDs that are difficult to forge and even if you can forge them, you'd get hit by hefty penalties for doing it.

This is a silly argument. Criminals will forge i.d.'s regardless of the law *because - duh! - they're criminals. It's what they do*.

And if you think it's difficult to forge a driver's license or a passport, from *any* country, you've been swallowing too much government bullshit. For $500-$1000 you can get a completely new, legal identity that'll check out if the government investigates it, because it was purchased directly from the folks who control the system that issues i.d.'s in the first place. I could, in 48 hours, get a perfectly valid (and new) SSN, drivers license, and birth record entry which will hold up under government scrutiny *because the folks who control the system will sell them to me, and they aren't forged*. I can get decent forgeries for just a few hundred bucks, if I don't need to pass a serious security check.

Internet i.d.'s will be no different, and no harder to forge. Or to buy, from the right people.

Max

This is a good idea, but...

[SiliconEntity]

This is a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough.

I didn't just block Spain. I set my system to blackhole the whole damn world!

Just think of it! All over the world, anybody tries to send me email, and it disappears into a black hole. Eat dirt, spammers!

And of course all the legitimate email disappears as well. But that's the point! When I talk to someone and they complain that I didn't respond to their email, I explain that it's not me - it's their world's policies about spam! Once you get your act together and get spam off the net, then I'll unblock you, I say. Until then, don't come crying to me - talk to your ISP, to your elected representatives, to the UN. That's where the problem is, and until you can solve it with them... you're blocked.

Yup. I figure this spam business is going to get cleaned up PDQ once people realize what it's costing them. We're going to get a nice, spam-free net, and it's all because of me. You're welcome.

Re:about time

[trelanexiph]

Telefonica.es is the ISP, as RIMA-TDE (another hat it wears) it has been responsible for the continuing incredible 419 spams out of Spain, though they're a BIG ISP, and they are, this does not excuse them from policing their network and ensuring that such things are kept to a minimum, and terminations occur when appropriate. The issue here was they refused to identify corrective actions, refused to terminate abusive customers, and refused to return contact after they initiated contact.

Re:Bah, typical slashfoo

[bruns]

The AHBL is the redesign of the older blackholes.2mbit.com DNSbl from years ago. We've just changed its main focus on abuse in general - which includes e-mail, DoS attacks, etc.

We are apparently in wide enough use that we deal with TDE customers on a daily basis that are complaining that they are blocked.

Its not our primary focus to be the biggest.

Our primary focus is to protect our systems, and the systems we manage, from spam and abuse. We make our data available to anyone and everyone, because we know that our data will improve on the feedback of our users.

So far, we have had zero complaints from our users as to our blocking methods, even if they are extreme at times.

AHBL policies

[bruns]

The AHBL is very open to working with providers to solve their problems. On a daily basis, I can be working with several ISPs to figure out how to better tune our listings, or help them track down a spamming customer.

We only resort to this wide range listings when we're run out of options. In the case of TDE, we just do not have any more patience.

We gave them time. We sent them abuse reports. We even asked them to provide us with accurate information on their netblocks so we can tune our listings down to only their dynamic customers.

However, they ignored our requests.

The AHBL has very strict policies on what we will and will not do.

We are taking a strong stance on 419 and phishers right now - just take a look at our ongoing fight with megamailservers.com - we caught them in a lie with their phishing customers, and we are holding them responsible.

If we are having an effect or not, it doesn't really matter to me. All I do know is that we are taking a stance and asking others to support us.

The hope being that with enough people working with us, we will be able to force providers to do something about their problems.

Feel free to flame me all you want.

Blocking Entire Countries

[RWarrior(fobw)]

It would be nice if these kinds of things would get administrators' attention. I don't have high hopes.

Personally, I get anywhere between one thousand and one hundred thousand spams a week directed at my domain from some asshat in Brazil. They come addressed to user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com, etc., in alphabetical order. Tens of thousands of them. And that's just the Brazilian stuff. That doesn't include the mortgage ads, 419 scams, porn ads, and advertisements that will help me make my wife's penis larger.

Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.

And since I use a hosting service I can't implement a connection-level block because I don't have root on the box. Implementing SpamAssassin on the hosting server brings their box to its knees (I know because I've done it and they shut down my account); instead, I have to dedicate one of my own boxes to scanning all this shit -after- downloading it. My box does virtually nothing else.

And since my domain is my last name, I can't exactly change it easily.

SMTP is broken. It has outlived its usefulness, and it is past time for it to die. Born in an era when the internet was a far safer place, patches and scanning placed on top of it to stop spam do nothing to put the burden of sending mail where it belongs: on the sender. While tools like SpamAssassin, SpamBouncer and RBLs help us to avoid seeing the crap in our inboxes, they remain kludges that still eat up our processor time, bandwidth, infrastructure and money.

But all my work in call centers has taught me that stupid people will always exist, and that some of them can never be taught to behave properly. This means that any schmuck with enough money and enough time and some basic Google literacy can set up a broken copy of $YOUR_FAVORITE_SMTPD on $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS and become the latest spew.

Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender. All well and good, but nobody's bothered writing a bunch of cross-platform implementations that everybody will actually switch to, and that Microsoft won't be able to embrace and extend.

So where does that leave us mere mortals, except to use the hypersonic planet-smashing axe to kill the maggot-laying fly?

As a Spaniard...

[JCAB]

As a Spaniard living abroad, I care deeply about this. I do exchange plenty of legit email with Spain, you see, so this will affect me personally.

Contrary to what many people seem to think here, the announcement doesn't say thay'll block the whole country. That measure would be draconian, along the line of nuking a city to quench a major disturbance.

Instead, they say (correctly) that they are blocking the offending IDE, which "is the govt run ISP of Spain" so it can be expected that this ISP provider is a major provider, and many people will be affected. I believe that. Telefonica was, until a few years ago, _the one and only_ telephone communications provider of Spain. It is BIG.

This is unfortunate, but _if_ this provider really is such a non-cooperative major source of spam and hack attacks, then I can't blame them for blocking it, much as it pains me.

Re:As a Spaniard...

[Anonymous Coward]

As Spaniard...

It's true that the announcement does'nt say that they'll block the whole country, but telefonica rents his lines to other companies, so they will be blocking a lot of people, a lot more than the 50%.

Its incorrect that telefonica is the gov's isp, it was few years ago, but the previus government privatized it so the new government (we have elections a month ago) doesn't have any control over the company.
The process of privatizacion was very obscure, a lot of directives getting a large amount of money, the new president that was designed was a friend from school of the old government president, etc etc.

We've got only a pair of alternatives and isn't as easy as it seems to change provider, for example you can't change company in the first year whithout paying a large amount of money.

We're paying what the previous government do, they do their worst in exterior relationships, they had a very bad plan about new technologies, education, etc. For example Spain got the worst number of internet connections, internet services and the most expensive connections of Europe.

Telefonica got the worst client hot line you can imagine and they don't pay any attention to what the users says, but you've got no alternatives in the most of the cases.

So as a Spaniard and as a Telefonica user i thought that it isn't fair to ban the whole company ips but it's fair to make telefonica pay a large amount of money or punish it other way.

PD: sorry for my english

Society doesn't work like an ideal...

[Animaether]

Ideally, people would complain to their ISP. But, society is hardly an ideal...

-----

Somebody robs a bank and flees.
The cops don't know where he is, but know that he can't have fled beyond 5 blocks.
The cops cordon off those 5 blocks.
Everybody within can't leave, everybody outside can't get in.
Does society, in general, get pissed wtih :
A. The bankrobber, for robbing the bank, making this a likely necessity
B. The police, for preventing people from going where they want

Answer : B

-----

A local TV transmitter gets notice from a commercial network that the commercial network will no longer pay the transmitter to be aired. They'll have to put them on the air for free.
The local TV transmitter gives them the finger and pulls them off the air.
Delicate issue : the commercial network carries soap operas that are hugely popular within the local region.
Does society typically blame :
A. The commercial network for using their show's/shows' popularity to try and strong-arm the local transmitter for a better deal
B. The local transmitter for making it impossible to watch their favorite show

Answer : B. Real story where I'm from, and people ended up getting TV dishes en-masse.

--

Same thing with this...

Do you really think all those Spanish people are going to blame their ISP for hosting (known) spammers once they get word/realize that their mails out to the world are bouncing/getting eaten ?
Of course not. They're going to say "wtf. stupid blacklists - that e-mail has to be there today, and that blacklisting of my ISP is the reason it can't. I guess I'll have to hotmail it. *expletive*"

That's how cause and effect is going...
effect : ISP is blacklisted
cause : ISP hosts spammers
NOT the legitimate people's problem!

at least, until...
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : blacklists
Therefore - blame the blacklists!

you see, there is no :
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : ISP hosts spammers
relationship to most of society, so they're not about to blame the spammers.

And as much as I disagree with that stance, and would poke at my ISP to see if they can get off the blacklists a.s.a.p., I can't say that I blame users who point at the blacklists instead.

Maybe if blacklists could warn ISPs' users 3 days in advance. Maybe... mass e-mail them :x That's spam I wouldn't mind receiving it means I could ring up the ISP and warn them that if 3 days later the ISP still finds itself listed, I'd take my business elsewhere - and find a decent alternative in the mean time, rather than being caught off-guard.

Re:you mean BIG?

[Anonymous Coward]

A 419 e-mail refers to a particular kind of Nigerian fraud e-mail, not the number of e-mails sent.

Re:Geeks

[harlows_monkeys]

What a bunch of arrogant fucksticks...How about sending the Telco's CEO a registered letter, pointing out what will happen within a month if things don't change?

I think it is interesting that you call them arrogant fucksticks, when you have no clue at all how this stuff works. Hint: a block only becomes this big when the ISP has repeatedly ignored abuse reports over a long period of time. The only way to get their attention is to block them.

And, in fact, now that they have been blocked, they suddenly have shown an interest in dealing with their spam, and have contacted AHBL.

Note also that AHBL asked for details on address ranges, so they could tune the fine-tune the blocks to just catch the dynamic addresses (the ISP claims that most of the problems are from users at Internet cafes), and was ignored. Note also that the ISP could solve this problem with a simple block on outgoing port 25 from their Internet cafe customers.

Korea was First, China Second

[billstewart]

Korea was the first country to get massively blacklisted. It's probably the most wired country in the world, with a large number of cookie-cutter badly-administered machines (mainly in the school districts) that had open relays on them, language barriers that meant that if you did send mail to the bad administrators, they couldn't read them and you couldn't read their replies, and it has a relatively small set of industries that do Internet-related business with US locations - if you don't make chips or consumer electronics, and don't have friends over there, you're highly likely not to get many false positives by simply blocking the whole country and its huge spammer load. And if you _do_ have friends over there, you can still block any email that's not in Korean character sets :-)

China's another popular place to block, not because of badly administered machines, but because of policies of tolerance of spammers and scammers and lack of useful response to abuse complaints. I haven't gotten much spam in Chinese in a while, but I still get lots with either the email origin or the web site located in China. And China's Internet access is controlled by the government telecom monopoly, who obviously don't mind spammers if they pay their bills.

So blocking a whole country isn't a new thing. But this isn't a whole country, it's just one of the major providers there. Spain doesn't censor their users' internet service - if you're blocking their mail, they can get themselves a Hotmail or Yahoo account to reach you.

Re:Korea was First, China Second

[BlueUnderwear]

China's another popular place to block, not because of badly administered machines, but because of policies of tolerance of spammers and scammers and lack of useful response to abuse complaints.

However, Chinese authorities have no tolerance against people who download anti-regime propaganda, or who sympathize with Falun Gong.

Hence, I solved my Chinese spam problem by adding the following to my sendmail.mc (it's only 4 lines, but Slashdot will probably cut the 3rd...):

# Really give the Chinese Spammers a mouthful...
changequote([[,]])dnl
define([[confSMTP_LOGIN_MSG]], [[EFGIC: U.S. Congress Condemns China's Oppression of Falun Gong on\nU.S. Soil and in China\n\nHouse Concurrent Resolution 304 calls on China's agents in\n the United States to halt all operations being carried out against\n practitioners of Falun Gong on United States' soil, as well as the brutal\n persecution of millions inside China.\n\nLONDON (EFGIC) - Last week, the US Congress introduced a concurrent\n resolution calling on the Chinese government to end its brutal\n persecution of Falun Gong in China and stop all activities against Falun\n Gong practitioners inside the United States.\n House Concurrent Resolution 304 (full text), introduced by Congresswoman\n Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, references China's own constitution and\n international human rights accords in calling for China to uphold\n freedom of belief, assembly, and speech for the millions of Falun Gong\n practitioners in Mainland China.\n Resolution 304 also specifically mentioned section 401(a)(1)(B) of the\n International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (22 U.S.C. 6401(a)(1)(B)):\n \"Whereas the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of\n religion, the right to assemble, and the right to speak freely, and the\n people of the United States strongly value protecting the ability of all\n people to live without fear and in accordance with their personal\n beliefs...\"\n Harassment, libel, and imprisonment have been widespread in\n Jiang Zemin's four-year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong. Torture and\n abuse in custody have led to thousands of wrongful deaths.\n]])dnl
changequote(`,')dnl

This will change your sendmail banner in such a way that spammers, should they dare to send to you, get a surprise visit from the political police ;-)

Re:incompetence outside of the US?

[sofar]

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.

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

And that guy 3 postings up has a valid point: 80% of all spam topics are US centric. I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that. The US is capitally guilty of keeping spam in place, either by the largest DEMAND (companies and customers), or by non-conclusive legislation.

Bad neighborhood.

[CrystalFalcon]

The equivalents exist IRL too.

I live in a place where I have difficulty finding a cab. If I call for one on the phone, they tell me to be out in the street waving for the cab, or they will drive past without stopping in the area. I never go out on a Friday or Saturday night without a bulletproof vest, and I'm always armed with at least one combat knife - often several.

This is where you live online. This is why people won't come to your place to deliver pizza. Or SMTP, or any other service.

This is news? Slashdot already blacklists TDE

[JackAsh]

Hi all,

My family actually lives in Spain, and uses Telefonica as their ISP. During my last visit, I discovered a wonderful surprise: Slashdot already blacklists the entire Telefonica data block. Whenever you select a link to read a story's comments, etc., it comes up with some message about not allowing that operation due to abuse from the netblock. It was pretty cool, really.

In any event, Telefonica is a big, monolithic telephone operator. They used to be the official, national telephone monopoly company before the market was opened up to other operators. Telefonica is still huge, nonetheless. They have voice, data, and cell phones in Spain; I think they also own a good chuck of media there. They run a pretty sizeable percentage of the telco business in South America (possibly the largest telco in the region). They bought our Terra back in the 90's, which bought out the Lycos networks for those that actually care.

Telefonica could probably have worse service, but they would need to train their personnel for it. As with most old monopolies there's this pervasive company culture that they are the center of the universe and if you don't like it you can go jump off a cliff or something. So I'd suggest not holding your breath for this situtation to be resolved. Although, as with every bureaucracy, every once in a while messages accidentally make it to the desk of the one guy who has a clue... :)

-Jack Ash

Using blacklists is OPTIONAL

[WoodstockJeff]

The use of ANY blacklist is OPTIONAL on the part of an ISP. And, in the case of the article in question, the lists mentioned are (and have been) more agressive than most people would like.

We only block based on a few external lists (ORDB, SpamCop, Blitzed Proxy), and then, not unconditionally. 90% of our blocks are done by internally generated lists, because we do have to receive mail from compromised sources at times... our business customers have clients in countries that are notorious for spamming, and even on ISPs that are bad.

That said, we do not accept any mail on the first pass from a large number of subnets, varying in size from /24 up to /8's, and a growing number of European subnets are on that list - not just Spanish ones. Mail from these subnets is "soft-bounced" (given a 451 error code) until it can be reviewed for legitimacy. And anything that doesn't have at least 1 retry is judged to be a proxy-based spam attempt.

Now, I will check bounces against some of the more agressive lists in deciding whether to make exceptions for these "soft bounces", but the final authority is a check with the customer on anything questionable. A million-customer ISP can't do that; that's one of our advantages...

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.

Re:incompetence outside of the US?

[budgenator]

What determine "who have no business sending smtp"? virus or trojan ridden computers

That's not an unreasonable start for a definition. If your the webmaster of example.com, and your ads are coming through an smtp server in example.com's domain, your going to be careful not to get your domain blacklisted. Most hosting provider's have some way of alowing you to compose Email on your local machine, and sending through your hosted domain. Even if they don't, a perl or asp script on your websever can do the trick real easy.
Anyone with the knowhow that is paying for an internet conection deserves the right to use that internet conection as they see fit. No you don't, you have the rights given in your ISP's Terms of Service. And I'd bet that all of those rights are subject to change without prior notification. If you don't like the service provided by your ISP, simply find one who does. You can even look into getting a raw pipe for yourself, then you can deal with all of an ISP's headaches.

The Bottom line is an Internet cafe that doesn't block out-going port 25 is just an open-relay that requires your physical presence.