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Unplugging Email To Combat Spam
monkeyserver.com writes "from Reuters (via CNN) we hear that 'Consumers who allow their infected computers to send out millions of 'spam' messages could be unplugged from the Internet under a proposal released Tuesday by six large e-mail providers.' They are looking at 100 per hour or 500 per day; this doesn't really sound like a bad idea, though it could cause problems for a few people trying to run companies from their basement..." On the other side of the coin, rastakid writes "It appears that Microsoft is taking its actions against spamming a little bit too far: Hotmail accounts which are suspected of sending spam are closed without a single investigation. This article states that Maariv International registered a new Hotmail account and sent an abuse message about spamming activities from that account, while not a single message was sent from it. Microsoft closed the account immediately, without investigating."
Internet companies should make sure that their equipment has been properly secured so spammers can't route their messages through them
I agree. Open relays, apparently not as common as they used to be, are still a huge source of the spam we intercept. I'd be in favor penalties for open relays (in theory), but how would that be effective, being that a lot of it originates from outside the US?
Sigs cause cancer.
I'm just curious if you have any rights and how the ever popular Gmail and growing yahoo mail will treat complaints as in my case it was someone upset with something i did claiming spam and not abuse by anymeans worth of terminating a long standing account and prohibiting me from accessing years of archived mail that was lost because of the cancellation.
They did email me i got a free passport account though. Funny i'm terminated but then they try and push something with real potential for abuse and sensitivity
... will be affected too. I guess that would probably mean the death of MailMan
As seen on Wired: Get a free desktop PC
It's a bit creepy that somebody was able to register a new Hotmail account, send nothing, and then get it closed by sending a spam complaint. Even the dumbest safety check would have proven the alligation to be false because Microsoft should be able to tell from logs that zero messages were ever sent from the account, so even if that was 100% spam that's still zero spam messages!
The risk of having an account stripped from you because somebody who knows your address falsely accuses you of being a spamer is a bit high to take. Then again, anybody who takes their e-mail seriously shouldn't be on Hotmail anyway...
Guess what, the most exploited open relays are running unix/linux variants, either because they are in a country that doesn't care about spam, or because some wannabe system admin-computer geek set up linux and doesn't know how to secure sendmail.
At least one UK ISP (NTL Cable) started doing this at the time of the Blaster worm to reduce the rate of infection among their subscribers. Machines which were infected and transmitting infected packets were booted off the network and not allowed to reconnect until they were clean. Owners had to contact NTL to get theirconnections unblocked.
As a techy, I ended up cleaning up several machines so their internet-porn deprived owners could feed their fixations. That said, I can't blame NTL for doing this, it was the responsible action and was done at the right time.
I believe that the duty of ISPs to prevent their customers destroying the internet by inadvertent DDOS should be at least as important as the contractual duty to the consumer.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Consumers who allow their infected computers to send out millions of "spam" messages could be unplugged from the Internet under a proposal released Tuesday by six large e-mail providers.
Isn't conspiring to restrain trade illegal? Comcast, AOL and others might be opening themselves up to suits from legitimate businesses.
From businesslaw.gov:
"Antitrust laws make it illegal to conspire to restrain trade or commerce in any marketplace, regardless of size."
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Back when I was still clueless about spoofing, I sent an abuse complaint to Hotmail about some spam I had received that looked like it came from a hotmail account...
They replied with an explanation of what spoofing was.
Then again, maybe the spoofed hotmail address didnt exist in the first place, so they couldnt shut it down sight unseen as they seem to be doing now.
You might find it much more effective to put your club calendar on a web page, doesn't have to be any fancier than whatever you email out. All 208 members of your club know to look there for updates.
This approach beats the "spamming out the newsletter to a list" approach, hands down. Especially when your list grows past manageable sizes.
If you want to operate a mailing list for your interest group, there are good ways to go about that. If you want to dissemenate information periodically, there are much more effective ways than email, more reliable, an overall better use of resources, easier to manage, and just plain the right way to do things.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Instead of a complete disconnect, why not redirect all traffic to a proxy that permits connections only to specific anti-virus and update sites, and directs all other web traffic to a page that says "your machine has been quarantined for {spamming|DDoSing|Whatever}, here's what you need to do to fix it..."
.sig
Allow them to reach microsoft update and redhat.com and they're more likely to be able to fix the problem.
-- not a
My mom basically runs a country dance club in my hometown. It has well over 500 members in it. Every month she sends out a newsletter by email to all the members that request it. She's already have had problems with spam. Her ISP's spam protection labeled her address as a spammer so she couln't get these newsletters to anyone for a while. Her dialup ISP seemed be pretty cool about it when she called them, and were able to resolve the problem immediately. But if her ISP would follow the ways of these email providers, it would probably force her to email the newsletter over the course of a few days, which would be really annoying and cause problems. Assuming she doesn't get "unplugged."
I can understand that spamming has got really out of hand, and that something needs to be done about it. But I think the countermeasures might screw other people (like my mom) who are running non-profit orginazations and are sending information on their member's request. It's unfortunate that a handful of people who want to make a few dollars by abusing a system screw over the people who use that system ethically.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
SPF is a good idea in theory, but it can cause nightmarish problems in some situations.
One of my customers has their website hosted by one company, and their internet access provided by another company. Their email clients were set up to use their ISP's mail servers, rather than their webhost's, but still use their domain name for the outgoing address.
The webhoster implemented SPF, and all of a sudden, they couldn't send emails within the company, because they were coming in from mail.isp.com, as opposed to mail.webhoster.com.
The webhost company's solution was: "Use our mail server."
This would be fine, other than the ISP blocks outgoing port 25 to prevent spam, thereby prohibiting the use of any mail server other than mail.isp.com.
If everybody used the same anti-spam solutions, it would be fine, but they don't, and the mish-mash makes legitimate email very difficult to send sometimes.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......