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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
Doesn't this pose a risk for effectively DOS'ing all hotmail users? Just create a script to aggregate Hotmail accounts through google and send complaints? Thats mildly annoying.
--Kevin
... will be affected too. I guess that would probably mean the death of MailMan
As seen on Wired: Get a free desktop PC
Before this gets slashdotted:
Exclusive: Hotmail shuts down "spammers" who don't spam
Complain you got spam from a Hotmail user, and Hotmail's abuse team will shut down their account, no questions asked.
Hotmail.com shuts down Hotmail accounts shortly after receiving complaints about spam being sent from them, without checking if the user has actually sent spam, NRG Maariv has learned. Thus, malicious users can cause the shutting down of accounts, as an act of revenge or just for kicks.
In its haste to fight spam, Hotmail has foregone looking into abuse reports it gets from email users. In three instances documented by NRG Maariv, Hotmail's abuse team shut down Hotmail accounts less than 24 hours after receiving complaints about spam being sent from them, even though the spam mail clearly did not originate from those accounts.
In two of the instances, the spammers spoofed the sender's address so it looked like it was sent from a Hotmail account, while they were actually sent through an Israeli ISP. In both instances, the spoofed accounts were shut down.
The third instance was a test: NRG Maariv opened a new account with Hotmail and sent no email whatsoever from it. Using a different email, we filed a spam complaint, saying it came from the new Hotmail account. Attached were Internet headers from an old spam, where the sender's address was replaced with that of the new account.
Within less than 24 hours, we received a message saying the new account was shut down.
"My name is Claire, and from what I have read in your message, you are complaining about the unsolicited email you received from a Hotmail account", said the message written by Claire C. with MSN Hotmail Technical Support. "I have closed the account you reported in accordance with the Hotmail Terms of Use (TOU). It is a strict violation of the TOU for our members to send objectionable material of any kind or nature using our service".
Trying to log on to the Hotmail account, we found it closed. No explanation was provided, just a laconic message saying "Account Closed. Access Denied". No appeal procedure was mentioned. The account was shut down for good.
Hotmail's public relations representative, Waggener Edstrom, has yet to respond to the story.
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...
That doesn't mean that it isn't a stupid or asinine thing to do. It just means that they wouldn't be held culpable.
I gave up on Hotmail a long time ago, not because of spam sent from those accounts, but because any time I opened up a hotmail account, it was immediately deluged by SPAM
The CB App. What's your 20?
I think something like this could work, but not on it's own.
ISPs should send a letter or e-mail to all their customers (i.e.
make sure they get it) stating that they are about to introduce
rate-limiting both from their smtp servers for that IP address/subnet
and from port 25 from the IP(s).
Customers who don't know what this means or who aren't bothered will
ignore it, and will be rate-limited (so they basically won't be
affected since they either a) aren't bothered, or b) aren't heavy
e-mail users).
Customers who know they will be affected or otherwise want to be
rate-unlimited can e-mail the ISP and request the rate be removed.
Perhaps they could be asked to prove they are worthy by describing
what they've done ("I've patched and secured my Windows box, and
my other boxen run BSD and run no mail daemons").
This way, no one has their service unfairly cut back, and unknowledgable
users (those responsible for zombie-Windows systems) will be protected
(or everyone else protected from them..).
Ok, so what'll happen if you send a message about spam from "abuse@hotmail.com" to "abuse@hotmail.com"???
Slashdot, more repetitive than spam
Really. Those types of machines really are the bane, since Comcast actually started 'doing' something I've seen *nothing* from them. My inbox was empty for the better part of 2-3 weeks, no spam just e-mail. Then yesterday, I start getting a barage of spam from asian open relays. 35 e-mails to 70 spams a day and now it's climbing through the roof, really now. Pop online and I see 207 spams. Gah.
I mean come off it. And you *wonder* why entire asian hosts are blocked. It's because of crap like that, secure your machines or boot the bloody idijits off of them.
I don't care if you are too stupid to figure out *how* to do it, pay someone, call that smart 12 year old who knows how but do it. But bloody well do it.
Om, nomnomnom...
The poster makes the claim that 100 per hour or 500 per day would only cause problems for people running companies from their basements. I heartily disagree. Think of people who run mailing lists from their home servers, these can easily send out more than 500 messages a day. Another example, when I recently got engaged, I sent out an email to a LOT of people. Probably over the course of that first hour after I sent out the original notice I sent out well more than 100 emails. I wasn't doing anything wrong.
The real fact of the matter is that this will do nothing to stem the tide of spam when one considers that most spam is now generated by zombies. Also, don't think they won't just find a way around it. This is like the DMCA, it only stops the honest people.
Fortunately, there has been some movement on SPF.
I suppose I can be happy about that.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
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
So if I email an event notice to my club membership list of 208 addresses, (given freely for this purpose) I'll be labelled a spammer unless I split the mailing up over 3 hours? There are other ways to find spammers besides shear output.
~~~~~
If you throw it, it will come.
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.
A lot of people's hijacked systems could have been kept clean were they fully patched:
I've been saying for a while now, if an ISPs sign-up disk had all current Windows service packs and critical patches loaded into it and installed them as part of the setup procedure -"You consent to Windows update patches being applied to your system during install"- then I'm sure a lot of network and support load could be lifted off the ISP and the net as a whole. If they could broker a deal to install Zonealarm or Sygate Personal firewall at the same time even better.
It isn't an unreasonable expectation that a machine connecting to a public network shouldn't have gaping security gaps. In fact, IMO, it is a public duty that it should not.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
It has come to my attention that the email address
[*@hotmail.com] has been sending out large quantities of spam.
Please correct the situation as you see fit.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
You overlook some of the more obvious effects of this policy. Basicly if I disliked you, and you had a fairly important hotmail account... It would become trivial to mess with you out of spite.
Many people use their email accounts for very critical information or personal correspondence. Getting them shutdown because somebody said it was used for spam is wrong.
Another thing. What if spammers took to spamming the support mail with huge amounts of this account used for spamming messages while using some accounts for spamming. Backlogging the folks while raising heck on the side. The more you think about any solution to spam the more you think of ways around it, if you were a spammer.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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
Umm, no. The days when you could send emails from your own SMTP server are long gone now.
First, the cheapest ISPs blocked port 25 entirely, except to their own SMTP server. The idea caught on, and most are blocking port 25.
Now, even with the very good ISPs, you can send mail over port 25, but even major ISPs are using different spam lists like the SORBs DUL, that blocks ALL EMAIL from dynamic IP addresses, bar none.
In the near future, having a static IP and one of the better ISPs won't help still. You'll also need to be running your own DNS server, and provide SPF records.
Frankly, limiting people to 500 emails per day is rather benign compared to all the other measures that have already been taken up to this point. All signs point to the future being even worse for anyone who doesn't want their e-mail service provided by one of the big ISPs.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant