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Comcast Gets Tough on Spam
WeakGeek writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Comcast, the nation's largest broadband ISP, has started blocking port 25 to reduce Spam. Jeanne Russo said Comcast is not blocking port 25 for all its users because it does not want to remove the option for legitimate customers who process their own e-mail. So the company is monitoring traffic and picking out machines that look suspicious. By blocking port 25, they say they cut Spam by 20% last week." ZDnet has another article, with a nice statistic: Comcast generates 800 million email messages/day, but only about 100 million of those are sent through Comcast's SMTP servers.
And what if they make a mistake and block someone who just happens to send a lot of mail?
Is there a place to appeal?...as good as this could be, I think it's going to inconvenience a lot of people.
I still don't understand how spam exists economically. I guess people are dumber than I thought:
"Wow! I think I'll find out more about this Viiagraa! Thanks hf387hfjsd73@hotmail.com!"
If they detect port 25 traffic over a certain threshold, do a quick dns blocklist check. If they're blacklisted, stop traffic on port 25 for that customer and contact them to let them know their machine may be infected.
I bet it would be a lot more effective to automatically open accounts with that port 25 blocked. If you want to use it, you give them a call and ask for it to be opened. I bet at least 95% of the spam being created is being created without the user knowing so closing port 25 won't affect them.
Just put these dickhead spammers in jail for 5-10 years for causing so much disruption and cost to the world. I was reading a few days ago (and feel free to correct me/link to the URL) that spam causes ~$1,900 in lost productivity per employee, per year, in the US. THAT is absurd!
On a side note, people with virus infected machines will now notice they can't send email to their external SMTP servers, and call Comcast, which they will reply that you have a mass mailing internet worm, and you've been spamming thousands of messages a day. Due to your incompetence, we have turned off your external access, forever.
http://www.fsckin.com/
SpamCop will take care of figuring out the origin and reporting spam for you.
I used to work for an ISP. We blocked all outgoing Port 25 to keep our customers from relaying. We also blocked inbound at first, to keep out spammers. This ran into trouble quickly. Not only are there services that don't offer SMTP, there are some that insist you use an address at their domain on all outgoing. We had customers that either couldn't send at all, or not with our address because their broadband carrier wasn't accepting their messages. The way we fixed this, we put up an authenticating server. This way, if you ouldn't connect directly through us you still had one of our servers you could use. Worked just fine, and made a lot of people very happy. I doubt we had as many as 0.01% of our customers complain about this, mostly because they needed to send work mail from home and their company insisted that all mail with the company address went through their own servers.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
... This is starting to worry me a little. I have been happily running my own mail server for over a year now. The reason being is that I want the ability to host all my own solutions and at the same time use the bandwidth i'm already paying for.
With wonderful dynamic DNS services like no-ip.org I am able to do this on any dynamic IP and I have no reason to worry about needing one of those pesky static IP addresses.
Hopefully if something were to happen where I'd start getting blocked I could just use my connections at work and contact their e-mail admins directly to resolve the issue. However this slash and burn tactic is just the wrong way to go about fighting spam. Hence one of the reasons I left Earthlink/Mindspring, who block e-mail from ALL Dynamic IP addresses and also block outbound port 25 on their networks.
Now, in my case, none of this applies, because I have a clueful ISP (Hi, Speakeasy!), but back in the Dark Ages of DSL through $TELCO, believe me, I had to. Or I didn't get mail. And believe me, I live for my mail.
And do you think Comcast finally took this step because they decided to stop their spamming users?
Hell no!
The only reason they got off their asses is because admins started wholesale blacklisting of their IP space and their customers started complaining.
Blacklisting WORKS! It's the only way to force these ISPs to be responsible.
If you're running content-based filtering, you're part of the problem. If you refuse SMTP traffic from confirmed spam sites, you are part of the solution.