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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?"
A few other countries that can use this are found here.
Dude, where's my packet?
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.
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.
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"
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.)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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
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.
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.
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.
Brielle
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.