Savvis Grudgingly Get Savvy About Spam

ElvenMonkey writes "The BBC is reporting that Savvis has finally promised to ditch those accounts that are using its network to send spam, in an effort to reduce the damage already done against its reputation; the CEO promises that all such accounts will be closed within 10 days (working days?) Amongst these accounts are believed to be the majority of the top 150 worst spammers worldwide."

Comments

Truth about Savvis

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go to Savvis.net for the official spiel or try http://www.savvis.info/ for the truth.

Right after they were threatened with a netblock

[Animats]

This only happened after Savvis was told that their entire network was about to be e-mail blocked.

ePorn is very profitable

[winkydink]

I worked at a major competitor (big company) of these guys for a while. Almost 50% of hosting revenue came from Porn. They were great customers. Seldom complained. More often than not, paid full price for bandwidth, and always paid their bills on time.

Re:Question

[arivanov]

There is a good saying - if you steal one penny you are a thief. If you steal one billion you are a banker.

Similarly, what is unacceptable for a mom and pop garage shop ISP is perfectly acceptable for a Tier 1 or a larger Tier 2 ISP. If they decide to make a business from hosting SPAMmers (and some do) there are very few means to fight them.

Re:If they were serious.

[Chatmag]

Why not turn spammers information over to the Florida AG office. They're itching to try out our new spam law, and besides, with all the damage from the hurricane outbreak here, the state could use the money.

My girlfriend and I had just bought 28 acres to open a nursery next spring, and found a large oak across the only building on the property. It was an old frame structure, and not worth much, but now we have to buy something for an office. Too bad I couldn't get some of the spammers fines to buy a new building.

They're just not worth it

[Trailer Trash]

He disputed the figure of $2 million a month revenue from the spammers, and said the actual figure is only a tenth of that amount.

It's not worth $2m/month for the bad publicity, how much less then $200K/month. That doesn't make sense. If you're only making $200K/month, little over $1000/spammer/month, then dump them. Why is this even being discussed?

SPEWS really DOESN'T block anyone

[billstewart]

Several replies to the parent article have disagreed and said that SPEWS does block people. But it doesn't, and the parent article is correct that that's a spammer lie (as well as a common misperception by some non-spammers who don't RTFM.)

What SPEWS and similar services do is blacklist people, and users of the blacklists can decide whether to use the blacklist to block incoming messages, or whether to use it as weighting in systems like SpamAssassin. I fairly commonly see SpamAssassin ratings that say "X points because it's in blacklist1, Y points because it's in Blacklist2, Z points because it's matches the Nigerian_3 pattern, N points because it's ALL YELLING", etc.

SPEWS does have a reputation for being overzealous, and blacklists that are way overzealous get ignored by users, or given a low SpamAssassin weighting or whatever, as opposed to more conservative and responsible blacklists. But that's a choice you can make.