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Verizon vs. Europe
mikrorechner writes "The Register has a story about Verizon blocking all incoming email from Europe since 22 December. Why? To reduce spam. I know that some providers block countries like South Korea by default, but I was not aware that Europe was seen as a major spam source. Well, it seems Verizon knows better..."
I was considering blocking the entire IP range for the US, since I never get anything other than spam from there.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Living in europe , and having several difrent european email address , i cant recall one bit of spam that came from the EU .. im not saying it dosnt exist but logicaly since i have a .de email address (germany)
why is all my spam in American english (im not german i only live here) but everyone i talk to around here gets a vast marjority of the spam from companys in the USA........anyway...
Verizons policy seems to be the equvilent of chopping off your legs because you have a rash on you right big toe!
Maybe it's time to turn "Verizon" into a verb. As in:
BTW, just to remind people 'cos this comes up a lot. While Verizon and Verisign are both power-mad groups with some connection to communications, they're not the same company. Thank you.You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I have read repeatedly here and elsewhere that most spam comes from "spam zombie" machines "pwned" via the machinations of malicious virus writers. Ergo, a machine spewing viruses via email is (a) a spam source in training and (b) attempting to create other zombies/spam sources. It therefore seems logical that any ISP serious about fighting spam would welcome reports of subscribers spewing viruses, whereby to notify the subscriber of the infection and/or suspend the account until the problem is fixed. On the assumption that the latter point is true (which I doubt), why do SpamCop and other spam reporting outfits refuse to report/notify ISPs about viruses spewing from their mail servers? If the number of owned machines is as represented, it seems that a huge step toward controlling spam would be identifying and fixing said machines or suspending their ISP accounts BEFORE they start spewing spam. (Note to trolls: Please do not start up about "lusers" not knowing how to identify the true ISP of an infected account and all that. SpamCop, for one, does this automatically based on IP address, so, the mechanism for reporting viruses to the source ISP is the same as for reporting spam.)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
alot of people block email from verizon (or containing verizon URL's in the body) as they seem to host alot of spammers :-)
That's easy for you to say. I get 150 spams sent to my personal email address every day. Of course, I have had the same address since 1992, two years before Canter and Siegel began their usenet barrage. Taking your steps now would be the ultimate example of closing the barn door after the cows have wandered off.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Given Verizon's reputation, I'm not sure I'd want them to accept e-mail from me, legit or not (yes, I'm a European). I support the basic idea of rejecting all mail from certain networks, countries or even continents based on past experiences of abuse, except I'd never want my ISP to do it for me without me having a say in the matter. I know approximately from where I can expect legit mail; Verizon can't possibly tell the same for all their users.
I don't send a lot of e-mail these days, and I have yet to see any mail of mine rejected due to my IP address being blacklisted. Should that happen, I sure wouldn't waste my time requesting to be whitelisted. If Verizon or their customers don't want mail from Europe, I won't bother them, regardless of their rationale. The biggest loss is on those uninformed users who aren't getting the service they have paid for. Rather than help Verizon identify a legit mail sender, I'd help my friends identify a legit mail provider, perhaps by rejecting their mail until they take notice.
"Greylisting" (a rather misleading word, as there is no "list" in the usual sense involved, but rather a delay mechanism) happens to work today only because such a small fraction of the Internet uses that method. Forget the "legit" part; it lets through all mail as long as the sending server follows the SMTP standard and allows for a temporary failure. When spammers find out they will be 50 percent more profitable by allowing for temporary failures, they will do so, and "greylisting" will have no effect beyond that slight delay. When a majority of open relays were either closed or blacklisted in the past, spammers managed to overcome that problem. They will overcome this one too.
I myself work at a university where "greylisting" is used, and it does indeed work - for now. It's however a very selfish way of protecting your mailbox, because you have to discourage the rest of the Internet from employing it in order for it to remain efficient, much like antibiotics...
A cure worse than the disease. If you have to manually keep track of every legit server that is inconvenienced by the delay, then you are going to forget a few of them, and they may find it easier to either adjust their envelope senders or drop you from their mailing list, than to remind umpteen list members of that forgotten whitelisting.
Bringing up manual whitelisting merely implies that the automatic mechanism isn't working properly. Consider that any automatic mail filtering mechanism, including the extreme one of rejecting any and all mail from anywhere on the Internet, will actually "work" if you can manually whitelist every legit sender. It then comes down to how much of the mail you receive requires manual intervention, and how much can be dealt with automatically.