Email Servers Will Choke, Says Spamhaus

Rub3X writes, "The legal battle between antispam organization Spamhaus and e360 Insight is heating up. Spamhaus has a user base of around 650 million, and its lists block some fifty billion spam emails per day, according to the project's CEO Steve Linford. Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox says the immediate issue is that if the domain is suspended, the torrent of bulk mail hitting the world's mail servers would cause many of them to fail. More than 90% of of all email is now spam, Cox says, and he doubts that servers worldwide would be able to handle a ten-fold increase in traffic." Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable. The article paraphrases CIO Cox as saying that the service will continue "even if there is a short-term degradation."

Comments

I say let the spam come

[pembo13]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

I still think they 3360 guys just look and smell like spammers. That spamhaus aggrees just adds to this conclusion. Here's what seems to amount to the spam histroy of the "plantiff".

Re:I say let the spam come

[misleb]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

I think most internet users still remember what it was like before spam filtering became common. Wait a few more years. Then users will take the filtering for granted.

-matthew

Re:I say let the spam come

[RMH101]

...and you need some clue how running a profitable and functional ISP works...

Re:I say let the spam come

[jemenake]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

Which is why I'm surprised Spamhaus doesn't just "simulate" what life would be like without them... before we're without them. Dispense with the predictions of how much spam will increase and what fate will befall the servers. Just shut off your service for a bit and wait for everyone to offer you their firstborn. Enron did it with California's electricity and it worked like a charm.

Re:I say let the spam come

[MoriaOrc]

Enron did it with California's electricity and it worked like a charm.

After all, just look at them now!

(Sorry, as a Californian, I couldn't resist)

Re:I say let the spam come

[TapeCutter]

"I think Spamhaus is trolling after making an ass out of itself in court."

Ummmm, they didn't go to court and they have not accepted anything, Spamhaus are demonstrating their view that the court does not have jurisdiction, Spamhaus seem to have a clue what they are talking about but the judge isn't listening since they refused to recognise the court by showing up. And if push really did come to shove then Spamhaus would probably just "reboot the company" in a different country.

I've been in front of a few judges in my time and IMHO many of them are the most arrogant people you could possibly imagine. I know very little about the US court system but I am guessing a district judge is not very high up the judicial foodchain and would have a hard time shutting down the internet no matter how hard he bangs his gabble. Meanwhile the rest of the planet will treat an unenforcable court order from this judge about as seriously as they would a court order from the judge in this case.

Re:I say let the spam come

[.Chndru]

ICANN says no, http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-10 oct06.htm

Re:I say let the spam come

[ray-auch]

Actually, the problem (if you read the lawyers who've written on this) is that originally they _did_ go to court.

IIRC they asked the original (state, district ?) court to move the case to federal.

_Then_ they didn't turn up at the federal court because they _then_ decided they didn't accept its jurisdiction.

Re:I say let the spam come

[cortana]

You're leaving out the part where their solicitors requested the venue change without instructions. AFAIK Spamhaus dismissed them and are taking them to court for creating this whole fucking mess in the first place.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Tim C]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

And what exactly can we do about the problem? I'm part of the general population in this case, how can I help? I secure my machines (so no spam zombies for me), I don't buy from spammers or companies advertised by spam, and I'm not within the court's jurisdiction so I can't petition it (even assuming they'd listen, which they probably wouldn't and arguably shouldn't).

(I also appreciate the scale of the problem; I own a domain and thanks to some scum sucking low life using it in their forged From: headers, I get in excess of 1000 junk mails, bounces, etc per day.)

So what would you have me and the rest of the "general population" do?

Re:I say let the spam come

[Jekler]

Most users probably don't remember the rate of spam before filtering was common for a number of reasons:

1. The rise in internet usage since the year 2000 indicates, at best, only 1/3rd of the internet population could remember the rate of spam before filtering was common.
2. The rise of email usage indicates a large population of the people who were connected pre-filtering weren't using email.
3. The current volume of spam per person is at least triple what it was pre-filtering.

Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered. Assuming spam per person has tripled, anyone who was getting 20 spam per day pre-filtering would be looking at 60 spam per day now.

It would be a much deserved wake up call if spam filter companies were to shut down operations for a few days. It's obvious that the bodies overseeing this case think of Spamhaus as little more than a novelty. I think Spamhaus needs to send a crystal clear message, and perhaps the most effective way to do that would be to show the world how green the other side of the fence really is.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody has any doubt anymore about how bad an idea it is to have something as central as the DNS/registry be run by a company under the jurisdiction of a single nation? Spamhauses actions are legal in the UK yet it can be threatened in it's international operation by US laws.

That's why, even if it's slightly more inefficient, it's a good idea to have these things under the control of the UN, or at least significantly decentralised.

Re:I say let the spam come

[shabble]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

Which is why I'm surprised Spamhaus doesn't just "simulate" what life would be like without them... before we're without them.

Do people really think that the volume of spam received will increase that much?

Do Spamhaus have a world monopoly on spam blocking, such that if they fell down, there are no other measures to prevent spam?

I was under the impression that Spamhaus was one of a number of methods of marking/scoring spam, and that any sysadmin worth their salt do not rely on one source alone to determine what is spam and what isn't.

Re:I say let the spam come

[bfischer]

I know very little about the US court system but I am guessing a district judge is not very high up the judicial foodchain and would have a hard time shutting down the internet no matter how hard he bangs his gabble.

What is a gabble?

Re:I say let the spam come

[!eopard]

Spamhaus are probably afraid to do that - what happens if the internet survives? It would be only a short time before another blacklist would show up to take their spot. Instant goodbye to their business.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Kjella]

I think most internet users still remember what it was like before spam filtering became common.

Spam filtering has been following the surge in spam quite closely - I don't think the general population has any clue how massively the spam problem has increased on the server side. 99,9% of the users think there was a little surge of spam, then a little filtering was added and most of the problem went away.

Re:I say let the spam come

[kwark]

"Do people really think that the volume of spam received will increase that much?"

Only if Spamhaus is used as the only filtering method. Any decent ISP will have alternatives. Personally I use Spamhaus as the first filtering rule, second in line is greylisting, then clamav and last spamassassin.

95% of all incoming connections to my MTA don't get past greylisting (stupid zombies). Spamassassin catches nearly all spam that was left (also checking sender in a couple dns blacklists).

Without spamhaus the only thing that will happen is that there is a little more mail will be passed to spamassassin and spam formerly in spamhaus will get a lower score (about 1 point in SA 3.0.x).

Re:I say let the spam come

[dheltzel]

I'm surprised Spamhaus doesn't just "simulate" what life would be like without them

It's easy to explain why they don't do this. They know that only clueless email admins rely only on an RBL for Spam control. Only the "Spamhaus faithful" would get clobbered with the extra Spam and they would have to switch to a different method or lose their jobs. This would be a sure way to kill off your customer base by proving empiracally why a single point of failure in Spam detection is a bad idea.

I've seen as much bad behavior from the RBL maintainers as I have from the spammers, so I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter. The (very few) held emails are almost always legitimate. The only reason I even bother to hold them is to keep an eye on what's going on and kill the final few Spam emails. The system I use for my employer has an almost perfect rate of rejection. Most of our users get fewer than 10 Spam messages a year! I get a lot of questions from co-workers about how to deal with Spam in their personal accounts because we do such a great job of dealing with it in their work accounts.

I know the Spamhous fanboys will take offense at this post. My only comment is that you are free to use an RBL as your only Spam control if you wish, just as I am free to use what I consider to be better methods. Good luck to you if Spamhous ever goes dark for any reason -- you're gonna need it.

Re:I say let the spam come

[jcr]

So, who has standing to file a complaint against this spammer?

He lied on the jurisdiction issue, and if that takes Spamhaus off the network, then millions of us suffer economic damage from the result of his perjury.

Anyone in Illinois want to register a class action against the son of a bitch?

-jcr

Re:I say let the spam come

[Zocalo]

Losing Spamhaus isn't likely to have as much of an impact as they would have you believe, even if their two figures of 90% of email is spam and 75% of ISPs use Spamhaus are accurate. Why? Because most ISPs that use DNSBLs like Spamhaus use multiple lists, so if Spamhaus goes away then there is a fair chance that one of the alternate lists they are using will pick up the IP address anyway. If it doesn't, then the email may well fall through to a more thorough second level anti-spam system that actually scans messages which should hopefully flag the junk. Worst case scenario is that *some* of the other DNSBLs or *some* ISPs message scanning servers get more traffic than they can handle and slow to a crawl/collapse under the load.

The spammers know this of course, so chances are they are all set for the event, should it happen. I think that if Spamhaus does get its .org domain pulled without an alternative solution in place a DDoS against other major DNSBLs in conjunction with a spate of spam and trojans with 0day exploits will follow shortly after. Assuming that is that Spamhaus doesn't start providing its services on a domain outside the reach of the US legal system before then - "spamhaus.org.cn" anyone?

Re:I say let the spam come

[Martin Spamer]

Whilst that is a nice idea to prove the point, I can't see it ever happening.

The biggest email provides e.g. gmail and hotmail are never going to turn off their protection and leave there servers vunerable. The list providers have contracts and SLA that would prevent them from doing this on any significant scale. It just won't happen unless a court forces it on ICANNA/Spamhaus. Which is also unlikely, and if that did happen the internet treat that as damage route around the problem. Worse case scenario is you have a few thousand Spamhaus postmasters editing their hosts files.

Re:I say let the spam come

[ArsenneLupin]

What is a gabble?

GP probably meant gavel , the judge's small mallet which he bangs on his table to call for silence or attention.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Captain Murdock]

I remember hotmail, I remember having to spend five minutes sorting through two pages of junk emails to read two good ones.

Re:I say let the spam come

[fdiskne1]

I did this once back before my employer would let me take the time to build a real spam filter. Previously it was just SMTP antivirus that I had tweaked so it could block around 75% of the spam that was coming in over a year ago but had to be continually manually tweaked as spammers changed their messages. I had built it up slowly as the spam filter had gotten worse over the previous several years so no one really noticed how bad it really was. They told me not to bother, that I should not block spam at all. Okay. I turned it off. The complaints started rolling in immediately. They then allowed me the expense of setting up a REAL filter.

On the subject of what would happen if Spamhaus' domain gets taken down, I use Spamhaus as one of several RTBLs. If they go down, I may see a slight increase in spam. I'll see if I can plug their IP in so I don't even see that. I'm sure a number of companies could see a massive increase but I'm sure it will only be a blip on the radar as they will likely find another way to get Spamhaus or another service within a few days.

Re:I say let the spam come

[arivanov]

I have.

Here is the result:

Spamhaus gives only further sub-5% improvement on top of greylisting with a positive feedback loop at delivery/user report level. With relay level content filtering feeding into the feedback loop that will be down to under 3%. Greylisting on its own does 90%+.

The CPU cost of greylisting is not that much higher compared to DNS blacklists (and on a large site you can dynamically gate greylists into a local DNS greylist zone for distribution). In fact it is less if you form temporary firewall reject lists from your greylisting database.

So the answer is: technically Spamhaus is full of shit and the floodgates will not open. On most well managed sites it will be just another day. A bit more SPAM, but not a lot. At most it will make admins tune feedback loops into grey/black lists a bit better.

Move along people, nothing to see here. Spamhaus should stop dragging the rest of the internet into the stupid internet governance battle which is not for them to fight in the first place. I already commented on their position on this issue in past Slashdot posts on it.

Spamhaus should stop talking BS and move their operations to the same domain as their legal country of residence.

Re:I say let the spam come

[YGingras]

So what would you have me and the rest of the "general population" do?

This is going to be hard but the only solution is an aggressive boycott of anything in relation with spam. You don't buy from spammers, or so you think. Last time you bought a generic medication, did you check that its provider was never involved in a spam campain? The other step in a massive boycott is education. But don't worry, it's going to be easier to educate people once the floodgates are open. Personally I couldn't care less about spamhaus. I don't believe in lists. Power corrupt and history shows that lists admins can't handle that kind of power. My personal setup is gray-listing + bayasian training and I have really good results. But a technical solution can't solve the problem. Only education can and that's where the general population come into play.

Re:I say let the spam come

[williambbertram]

Of course they are spammers. If tiny gray guys in overcoats, fake moustaches, and dark sunglasses ask permission (in a squeaky voice) to shut down the mouse trap factory, what do you think is going on?

Re:I say let the spam come

[DoomfrogBW]

RTFA

I think you are terribly mistaken. Spamhaus screwed up. They could of ignored or sent an attorney as special counsel to the case without acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Illinois court. Because they asked it to be moved to Federal, they pretty much acknowledged that the judge now has jurisdiction over the case. Then, because they don't like the judgement, they go ahead and try and ignore it. Instead of not showing up, Spamhaus could of done a better job in front of jury. Because they didn't, the judge didn't have much choice as the plaintiffs win by default.

Re:I say let the spam come

[endemoniada]

Why go through all that trouble? Just open up the "spam" folder and voila! there's your two good emails :D

On a more serious note:
I love my gmail. 40+ spam mails every day, and not a single false alarm or unnoticed spam in months.

Re:I say let the spam come

[PhoenixFlare]

Yahoo still seems to be that way.

Just checked my old Yahoo account that I haven't used anywhere for anything for more than 5 years - 3037 messages in the spam box (30 days worth), and 474 messages in the inbox, 99.9999% of which is spam as well.

Re:I say let the spam come

[suv4x4]

Ummmm, they didn't go to court and they have not accepted anything, Spamhaus are demonstrating their view that the court does not have jurisdiction, Spamhaus seem to have a clue what they are talking about but the judge isn't listening since they refused to recognise the court by showing up. And if push really did come to shove then Spamhaus would probably just "reboot the company" in a different country.

I hope it's like you say, because in the media it came more like this:

Spammer: I'll sue you!

Spamhaus: Sue me!

Spammer: I sue you and I sued you! Your domain is goin' away!

Spamhaus: Oh no we give up, omg world prepare for e-mailmageddon! Fair well, fair well!

ICANN: We can't take your domain, Spamhaus.

Spamhaus: Oh what tragedy is before us, pitty us and you and... ICANN, you can't? Hmmm (damn it)

Spammer: I continue suing you and will win anyway!

Spamhaus: Oh no, world see how unfair the world is prepare for spamornado, spamunami, we're all doomed! Oh I pitty my sad fate! Oooh... Noo! Oh oh...

Random Observer: Dude stop making ass of yourself, you need neither the domain, neither you're the only solution for filtering spam out there. Take it like a man and maybe start respecting the court.

Spamhaus: Shut up observer, you're interrupting my dramatic routine.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate spam just like the next guy, but when you make a profitable business from spam fighting, you need at least some clue about how the legal system works.

"The" legal system? You make it sound like you think there's only one. Here's a clue: the US legal system is just one of many legal systems in the world. Spamhaus is based in the UK, where we have a somewhat different legal system. It is not reasonable to expect people based outside the USA to know (or care) how the US legal system works.

Re:I say let the spam come

[oahazmatt]

I had a boss who did this.

A customer was chewing him out for not blocking all spam. Granted, the customer only received admittedly four pieces of spam per day, but he was relentless in wanting my boss to know he wasn't doing a good job at all.

My boss told the customer to call back an in hour. Why? Because my boss was going to redirect all spam from the catch-all account to the customer's e-mail address.

The guy called back in ten minutes when he got hung up during a Send/Receive, apologizing like crazy.

Re:I say let the spam come

[ConceptJunkie]

For thew boycott to be effective, you would need 99.99% participation because if one person out of 10000 hits on a spam message, it's worth the spammers' time and money. The boycott will never, ever, work.

Nevertheless, you _should_ boycott spammers. I don't do business with spammers, and try not to do business with anyone who uses advertising tactics I find intrusive, offensive or just plain annoying. Of course, you can't boycott every business that does something to which you object or you would end up living in a shack somewhere in the woods living off of wild game and probably writing anti-technology screeds as well, but you can at least target the worst offenders.

The only solution that has any chance of working is to ditch SMTP, and that will happen about the time Duke Nukem Forever switches and shortly after we all switch to IPv6 and shortly before Microsoft goes open source.

Re:I say let the spam come

[mwvdlee]

Actually I do this once or twice a year, just to test the effectiveness of my spam filtering. Usually I keep it open for just a few hours and it generates a staggering amount of spam.

Without filtering, I alone would have been responsible for sorting through all the e-mail. With the quantities of incoming mail I measure in these tests, more mail would have arrived than I would be able to filter manually during that period of time.

Without automatic filtering, I would not be able to use e-mail anymore.

Re:I say let the spam come

[vivtho]

And what next? Police going off the streets for a day to "simulate" what crime would be like without them. What about fireman or paramedics? Even if you don't consider emergency services, there are still other examples that I can point out. Just as an example, how would anyone like to be going on a long-distance journey, to find that all the highway rest-stop's bathrooms are locked because the operators are complaining/striking against something?

I agree that Spamhaus is not an "essential" service, as compared to say, a fire department or the police, but they provide a useful service and are compensated for that. Who do you think is going to profit by them stopping their services for even an hour? The users, or the courts? It's the spammers who win.

While I don't have any ideas on how they can make their point to the public, I do know that stopping their services is the wrong way to go about doing it.

Re:I say let the spam come

[CastrTroy]

But at least with Yahoo, it ends up in the spam box. Hotmail puts it in your inbox. Unless you turn on the option to only receive mail from your contacts (Whitelists are stupid) then just about everything ends up in your inbox with Hotmail. I have accounts for both, and as of now, I have 927 spam messages in my spam box from yahoo. With hotmail I have I have 2700 message in my inbox, 14 of which are from my contacts; I have 12 messages in my junk mail box. So, hotmail is terrible at blocking spam, while Yahoo, at least puts it in a separate box for you, so it doesn't clutter up your inbox.

Re:I say let the spam come

[nizo]

Actually a gabble is the gavel the judge bangs to quiet the rabble.

Re:I say let the spam come

[grub]

Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered.

So much of it happens server side the end users would have no idea as to the amount. My home mail server which handles a handful of users gives me these stats. and this is just for the 8.5 hours of "Today":

(spamhaus) Listed at Spamhaus: 655
(sorbs.net) Listed at dnsbl.sorbs.net: 146

So that's just over 800 pieces of crap for today (so far) Those are server-side filters, not client side.

Re:I say let the spam come

[onepoint]

>> So the answer is: technically Spamhaus is full of shit and the floodgates will not open. On most well managed sites it will be just another day.

Your keywords in that statement is "most well managed sites".
I really know of few if any well managed sites. When I was a web host back in the late 90's, I would spend hours tuning my spam filters, and would help a lot of corporate system admins tuning theirs. But from what I can remember, those admins had to deal with upper management, that would prevent them from placing real tough filtering rules.

Onepoint

Re:I say let the spam come

[afidel]

Care to share your method that is so successfull? I'm sure a lot of other admins would love to know a system that results in very little spam and has a low false positive rate.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Grand Facade]

I'm getting 500 to 1000 emails a day, out of that 1 to 5 are legit. I am on the verge of pulling the plug on mail to my domain and just using Gmail. The majority of my network disc useage is mail.

So I agree, open the flood gates and then maybe something will get done properly about the problem.

Re:I say let the spam come

[jftitan]

Thanks for clearing things up for me... I really (originally) didn't understand what all the fuss was about until now.

I've never used Spamhaus to help filter spam from my mail servers, so personally... 'bring it on spammers!'. With that said. Spamhaus needs to gather some balls, and start facing the facts. If they pissed on the judicial system, and hoped that it would work their way, and it didn't, then boo hoo for them.

  Again, originally I was rooting for spamhaus to take e360 to the cleaners, but now that I see spamhaus is basically a bunch of underage wine babies, then they deserve to be kicked in the ass.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Anonymous Coward]

Judicious use of the delete button while reading through all employee emails.

Re:I say let the spam come

[PhoenixFlare]

So, hotmail is terrible at blocking spam, while Yahoo, at least puts it in a separate box for you, so it doesn't clutter up your inbox.

Well, that was part of my point...Considering I get maybe 1 spam per week at the most in my GMail box, having 400+ spams end up in the Yahoo account is still horrible, even considering I haven't completely cleared the inbox for a year or two now.

Re:I say let the spam come

[mortonda]

Care to share your method that is so successfull? I'm sure a lot of other admins would love to know a system that results in very little spam and has a low false positive rate

Maia Mailguard. With a well tuned SpamAssassin core, SARE rules, RBL Lists (of which Spamhaus is just one), DCC, Razor... and currently we're working with the SpamAssassin folks to get OCR working on image spam. It's an unusual day when spam gets through to me.

Disclaimer: I'm a Maia Mailguard developer.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

And what next? Police going off the streets for a day to "simulate" what crime would be like without them. What about fireman or paramedics?

Ever hear of the "blue flu"?

Re:I say let the spam come

[arminw]

......you need at least some clue about how the legal system works......

Really now, a US court can order a foreign entity around? I think NOT. The plaintiff doesn't understand the legal system. If you have a complaint against someone, in a foreign land, you file it under their legal jurisdictions. The **AA understood this when they filed their beef against DVD Jon in his land of Norway. It seems their judges over there know and follow their laws better than our US judges do the same for US law. He should have thrown that spammer out of court and told him to go sue them in the UK.

Re:I say let the spam come

[arminw]

....Take it like a man and maybe start respecting the court.....

Why should someone in the UK respect, obey or even consider an American court anymore than an American would think twice about a decision of an Iranian or Afghanistan court?

Re:I say let the spam come

[Nurseman]

Ummmm, they didn't go to court

Here is where your wrong, and Spamhaus has a problem. They DID go to court in the begining, and argued to have the case moved from State to Federal court. Which they succeeded in doing. But then they just didn't show for the trial. They recieved bad legal advice TWICE, and then defaulted. They still have a shot at getting this reveresed on appeal, but they need to show, or this ruling will stand.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Fred_A]

I know that I've been online long before the infamous "green card" spam hit Usenet and that I've been running my own mail hosts for most of the time since then (on an ADSL link even, after I've been looking for a broadband link for ages... I was even ready to pay 100€for it. As much as I paid in dialup fees. Well, actually I paid much more at the time.)

And now here I am, on a 18Mb/1mb so called broadband (well I suppose to US people it is) link, hosting my two domains, my MX, my webservers, a few services. And the spam to signal ratio is just ridiculous. I don't use any RBLs because I've been bitten by them more times than I can care to tell but I must get about about 1200 spams a day (for non obvious domains, my previous "sexy" address got twice that daily).

Spam isn't enough of a bandwidth hog to be a problem outside of email (as of now it doesn't use much absolute bandwidth, i.e. I can still play online games without trouble). However it uses most "email" bandwidth. Granted I don't get that much "real" email. Little enough that spam is probably 90% of what I get (if not more, I haven't gotten around to computing stats). However, It's gotten bad enough that I've got enough misses on both sides (ham and spam) that I can truthfully tell my correspondents that I have missed their mails because they have been missfiled *or* because they have been lost in the noise. And that sucks.

It doesn't mean Spam has become more effective, it means email has become *less effective* and that sucks.

It means spammers are now testing their messages against all of the common filters.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Hoi Polloi]

I wish more ISPs allowed for whitelists. I could easily specify what addresses I know are legit. If they let them bypass the filtering I'd worry about false positives less. I don't know why this feature isn't offered more.

Re:I say let the spam come

[secure paranoia]

not a bad thought but know that the people effected will not be CEO's having to cleanse their inboxes of spam messages..

it will be the admins and help desk techs fielding calls from angry users wondering why they are getting so much penis enlargement ads..

  -- some people are just self-conscious ya know?

Re:I say let the spam come

[Nurseman]

"The" legal system? You make it sound like you think there's only one. Here's a clue: the US legal system is just one of many legal systems in the world. Spamhaus is based in the UK, where we have a somewhat different legal system.

Correct, but if you operate a buisness in another country, you have to follow that countries laws. Ask Google about the Belgium case. But again, as numerous people have stated, Spamhaus' problem, is they tried both ways, first they argued, which gave the case merit, then they defaulted, which gave the spammers a slam dunk. BTW for all the hysteria, no one has said they will enforce this order yet. And it is only a prilminary order. Spamhaus still has chance/right to appeal. EFF Where are you ??

Re:I say let the spam come

[rgriff59]

I remember an old adage that said "Turn About is Fair Play."

As much as I'd like to suggest tar and feathers as a fitting punishment for e360, I believe that is generally frowned on these days, so I doubt it would work. However, I doubt that a class action would really amount to much more than some attorney chest thumping of motion, counter motion. Perhaps a different tact is needed?

Maybe we could take a lesson from the spammer. They cause lots of small problems that add up to a huge drain, and maybe they get really lucky, and make a score. Adopt the same strategy. Consider a coordinated, but arguable separate, set of law suits in multiple jurisdictions against e360insight for the damage they cause. No class actions, as that would give one single point to defend. For this to have the desired effect, it must drain the resources in many small pieces. Imagine if, say for example, on March 16, 2007, there were 50,000 independent suits filed across the country by the victims of the e360 spam. Each one could be for a small amount of damages. The important point is make them all independent, and resist a class designation. Imagine the burden of defending these. Imagine the default judgements if any got lost in the shuffle. Imagine the statement that would make to those who abuse not only the email systems, but our courts as well...

Re:I say let the spam come

[SCHecklerX]

How big is the system you administer? I am the mail gateway administrator for a global company. Last month our servers processed almost 2 *MILLION* messages. Of those, we rejected almost 1 *MILLION* based on XBL/SBL, and some other checks that we do. The rest of the messages must then be processed by our score based filtering system (spamassassin).

The problem is, that yes, we do have a tiered approach. Spamhaus is used by us as a full reject in mimedefang. This helps to keep our server load down, as we can do the quick hits without having to call spamassassin. We reject a LOT of stuff based on the SBL/XBL. If we suddenly could not do that, then our server load would skyrocket due to the increased demands by the score based system (spamassassin).

Now, we also do other checks that will result in an immediate reject. It may be that many of the SBL/XBL rejections would be rejected for other reasons should SBL/XBL go away (forged helo, helo not an address or domain name, etc). That's not a gamble I really want to make.

Re:I say let the spam come

[mrball_cb]

Spamhaus gives only further sub 5% improvement on top of greylisting

You assume that your customers won't leave en masse because "my sister just sent an email and it didn't get here 30 seconds later". When you tell them that cannot be changed, they will leave and go to someone who accepts and delivers email instantly. It doesn't matter that it is in their best interests, they will still leave. We can't do greylisting for that exact reason.

Here's what kind of stats SpamHaus does for us:
    Blocked from SpamHaus (hijacked cable/dsl modem): 160039
    Blocked from SpamCop RBL: 7869
    Blocked from internal RBL: 1145

So before even seeing content, we blocked 169053 connection attempts, and there could have been multiple emails on each connection. After all that being blocked, we still accepted 55K emails:
    Inbound per day totals: 55373
    Detected and rejected as spam 37677
    Detected and rejected as virus 254

and there was STILL 38K emails detected and blocked as spam. And in the real world, some of that 17442 emails (55373 - 37677 - 254) was spam too. If we open the floodgates and previously blocked email starts getting delivered, likely it would be about 100K emails that get past the spam filters, of which all additional email is guaranteed to be spam, so 80%+ of that delivered email would be spam.

Now, multiply those numbers times 4 and that is the load we would have to deal with, and we are a small operator compared to a lot of ISPs. In addition, we would likely have to get one or two additional machines to handle the increased spam scanning load. It does nothing but COST US MONEY to shut down SpamHaus service.

Before anybody points out the obvious, our SMTP Auth users are exempted from the RBLs if authentication succeeds.

One thing that I've not seen anybody mention though is how simple it is to make your nameservers forward spamhaus.org requests to their nameservers. Problem solved.

Re:I say let the spam come

[operagost]

Yahoo's filter is rather stupid in some ways. It spam flags 100% of all emails which do not have the recipient's email address in the "From"; which means that if you forward your email there from another account 100% of it will be tossed in alongside the v14gr4. Oh yeah, and if you set up a filter to ignore these messages or move them directly to the inbox, it doesn't work.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Paradise Pete]

"underage wine babies"

OK, I give up. What in the world is an underage wine baby? Does it have anything to do with a recently bottled Boone's Farm or Thunderbird, resulting in an unexpected pregnancy?

Re:I say let the spam come

[aeryn_sunn]

Actually, the judge is a federal district judge, which I think is in the Northern District of Illinois in the Seven Circuit. He is pretty far up the judicial food chain, at least on the trial level. Any order that comes out of his court is enforceable in all the US. Granted, not in foreign countries, but make no mistake, that with a judgment against the defendant, there are other ways to make a defendant, even in a foreign country comply or at least attempt to comply with the judgment. I don't know that much about international law, but there are trade treaties, trade courts, etc., that can be used to settle issues between foreign Plaintiffs and Defendants...

Re:I say let the spam come

[thc69]

Imagine the cost to the court systems.

Re:I say let the spam come

[MBGMorden]

Assuming spam per person has tripled, anyone who was getting 20 spam per day pre-filtering would be looking at 60 spam per day now.

I'd be happy with 60 per day. My personal addresses get right under 1000 per day (well, between the 2 of them). About 10-15 per day still manage to get through my filters. Even in today's spam filtering world I'm still looking at ditching my two established addresses and moving everything over to new ones.

Re:I say let the spam come

[dheltzel]

We use CanIt by Roaring Penguin. It is very inexpensive (worth it for a no-hassle install, config, and support of sendmail alone). There is a free license for up to 10 users to let you try it out. It uses SpamAssasin, sendmail, grey listing, etc. and give it all a nice scalable database backend and web admin frontend. It comes with the Perl and PHP source if you really want to change anything.

It's really a great system from a company that is making a positive contribution to opensource projects. We have been using it for about 4 years with very few complaints. Most of the complaints have to do with good email not getting through because I've been a bit too draconian with the settings, but it's easy to whitelist any senders or domains that trigger the filters in error.

Re:I say let the spam come

[nosferatu1001]

There is nothing that can mae a private UK company, which does not trade in the US, comply with a US decision.

Re:I say let the spam come

[thc69]

a bunch of underage wine babies,

"wine babies"?

I googled it, just in case it's a term for children born from alcoholic mothers or some such, and got the following (titled "this heaven gives me migraine"):

Overall it tastes like what would happen if Zinfandel and Syrah got together and made wine babies (it has a spicy quality but is neither as cloyingly spicy ...

Re:I say let the spam come

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, but that's irrelevant to the case at hand.

If you screw up at something, whether it be hiring bad lawyers or anything, you can't just put your hands over your ears and shout, "la la la I can't hear you!" Regardless of *why* they lost this court battle against the spammer is irrelevant, the fact is that they have to find a new legal team and make a legal defense instead of sending out doom and gloom press releases every couple days and ignoring the problem.

I've lost a lot of respect for these guys. As a neutral party, they're just looking like whiny children to me.

Re:I say let the spam come

[beefubermensch]

Finally a slashdot reader who has a clue about how spam works.
-Carl

Re:I say let the spam come

[sjames]

hey know that only clueless email admins rely only on an RBL for Spam control.

Agreed! I use Spamassassin for all email and never drop a connection based on an RBL. The net result is that if Spamhaus simply goes away, the load on my server won't change at all. Since in Spamassassin, being in a particular RBL is neither necessary nor sufficient to be tagged as spam, and several other RBLs are checked in addition to the baysean filter and various heuristics, it probably wouldn't even adversely affect the accuracy of the filtering. Spamhaus has so many false positives that it doesn't get a great deal of weight in my rules anyway.

The only servers that would see an increased load are the ones foolishly configured to drop connections based solely on a single RBL's say-so. A mail server may or may not be a single point of failure (depending on the use of a secondary MX), but is at least under the local admin's authority. Depending on a single RBL is a single point of failure that is not under the local admin's authority, a much more harmful situation.

Re:I say let the spam come

[jedidiah]

Americans that do business in Iran or Afghanistan would infact expect to come under their juridiction. This is a pretty common and basic principle. Now most businessesmen understand the value of the rule of law in general. They realize that it is this that allows them to make a profit and that encouraging disrepect for the law and courts in general is a really stupid idea.

          In the UK, the principles that protect your ass as an individual or business are the exact same ones that apply in the rest of the civilized world including the US.

Re:I say let the spam come

[dheltzel]

We process only about 100K messages per month, using a single small, old HP server. That is only about 5% of what you do. You would definately need a beefier setup that we have, but the load on that old box is pretty low. A new, dual Opteron server could likely handle a load like you have, but you'd probably want 2 for some redundancy anyway.

Using an RBL does help you reduce the load, but it comes at a cost. How easily can you create a white list of sites that you will accept email from even if they appear on an RBL? I deal with some companies that are not able to receive email from us. My co-workers get annoyed until I explain what their receiving servers are doing and then we push it back to the recipient and let them do battle with their ISP. If there is any "pushback" from the ISP tech, I just point out that we were able to send the email to them from a personal AOL account, but not from my company's email server. Who sends them more Spam?

BTW, the S/W that we use to filter email is from Roaring Penguin, the company that wrote and maintains MimeDefang. They have some terrific products that might be a upgrade for your systems, you should check them out.

Re:I say let the spam come

[friedmud]

Gmail is great at spam filtering... currently I have 4073 pieces of spam in my Gmail account from the last 30 days (it automatically removes spam older than 30 days)... and all of my real mail gets through just fine.

I highly recommend it to anyone.

Friedmud

(PS - I'm _very_ promiscuous with my email address... all because I know that Gmail will take care of it...)

Re:I say let the spam come

[cortana]

Given that their solicitors fucked up, they have two choices:

  1. Possibly forsake the spamhaus.org domain
  2. Waste millions of dollars in legal fees and travel expenses to fight a stupid court case brought by a spammer in another country

I don't think I would waste much time deciding what to do if I were in Spamhaus' situation!

Re:I say let the spam come

[thc69]

But don't worry, it's going to be easier to educate people once the floodgates are open.

What, by sending mass emails full of education?

Re:I say let the spam come

[NewWorldDan]

Actually, I didn't start seeing noticable volumes of spam until about 1998-99. At current rates, I typically see about 1 false ham, 20 uncertain and 250 certain spam per day. This compares with about 2 or 3 ham.

Re:I say let the spam come

[rkcallaghan]

thc69 wrote:

Imagine the cost to the court systems. [WRT Zerg-Lawsuit Strategy]

It is not uncommon for an individual-vs-corporate lawsuit to ask for damages to include the court fees associated with the case. It's usually a good sympathy move if you are representing yourself, as you look good to the court to say "The Defendant cost me $X with his illegal actions; I am requesting $X plus $110 to cover the case fee of appearing here today and nothing else."

In states or situations where the court fees themselves do not cover the cost of the trial; it would be a simple matter for the judge to add punative fine to make up for the difference. It's unlikely they would defend themselves against all 50k cases however; so the court fees are likely to well exceed the 10 minutes of time for the default judgement. These cases would be held in a civil court and so would not affect the timetable of any accused criminal recieving their speedy trial. Thus, time is not a factor because it will be accomodated by fees or fine.

In short, court fees awarded or not -- they get paid, the plaintiff has to pay them. Barring wide-scale incompetence on the part of the judiciary; any financial stress on the court system itself would be easily levied against the defendant. Being that taking the case to an incompetent tribunal is in itself a pointless endeavor; that we are (in theory) doing this to begin with suggests that we must at least assume said tribunal is capable rendering a verdict without becoming bankrupt because a particular defendant happened to actually commit 50k civil crimes.

~Rebecca (IANAL)

Re:I say let the spam come

[SeattleGameboy]

Hmmm when 99% of your incoming message is spam, it is time to rethink your opinion about whitelists.

My whitelisted hotmail account works like a charm and I have rarely lost any friend email due to the whitelist (if I missed it, I just ask them to resend and add them to whitelist, but that is pretty rare). I will NEVER go back to the days where I had to wade through hundreds of junk email to find one real email.

Re:I say let the spam come

[gsslay]

I don't follow your logic. Surely the conversation goes something like this;

Spamhaus: You're in the US, we're in the UK. We don't recognise your court of law.

Illinois Court: Aha! But you recognised us at first when you asked to change jurisdiction! Therefore you must have acknowledged our jurisdiction. So pay your fine!

Spamhaus: Why is asking to change jurisdiction acknowledging jurisdiction?

Illinois Court: Because the law says it does.

Spamhaus: What law?

Illinois Court: United States law.

Spamhaus: *sigh* Please refer to our first statement.

Re:I say let the spam come

[thc69]

It'd be nice to have a coordinated call and snail mail campaign to get these stupid politicians to wake up and solve this problem.

Maybe we could snail mail printouts of each spam we get.

Re:I say let the spam come

[harlows_monkeys]

Ummmm, they didn't go to court and they have not accepted anything, Spamhaus are demonstrating their view that the court does not have jurisdiction, Spamhaus seem to have a clue what they are talking about but the judge isn't listening since they refused to recognise the court by showing up

This is simply wrong. The spammer sued in state court. Spamhaus did show up, to request that the case be moved to Federal court.

Then, once the case was moved to Federal court, Spamhaus stopped showing up.

This was a major legal blunder on their part. Spamhaus picked the court, and that gives the court jurisdiction over Spamhaus. The correct way to assert lack of jurisdiction was to assert it at the state court, and to file no motions or answers or anything else other than to tell the court that you won't be participating because you don't believe the court has jurisdiction.

The only good news for Spamhaus here is that they've probably got a good case for malpractice against their lawyers.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Maxo-Texas]

EU can order foreign entities around.
China can order foreign entities around.

If you do business in a country, then you are exposed at least to the extent that you do business there.

It is a bit of a tragedy since a large nasty corporation could repeatedly take people to court until they were drained dry.

On the other side, if you can only be sued where you are based, that opens up another host of nasty issues: "Bomb's 'R Us sold from Blariana where terroism is legal!" and "Crack Crackhead deals: Where boiled down Cocaine is legal!", etc.

The internet allows an end-run around government rules when combined with Fedex (having recently purchased absinthe which is legal to own but illegal to buy or sell in my own country-I've personal experience with this irony). But we only get away with it because there are so many of us that they have to focus on the real bad stuff.

I don't know- in the end it seems to me that if you do business in an area (i.e. they send you money) then you are exposed at least up to the limits of that money amount.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Robber Baron]

Shit, I remember when you used to be able to leave your relays open on your mail servers, and nobody would mess with them.

Re:I say let the spam come

[jafiwam]

Ooohhh. I am all for having a "no spam filter day. Someone want to pick one?

During a typical week, we have to adjust the spam filter settings about twice. Always on Mondays when the new crop of spam zombies, new domain names, etc. all hit the net.

Sometimes, we have to turn the filter off to let the queues clear.

Then the users call with a snarky attitude and complain about not having a filter for stock pump and dump scams that are one big GIF file. We explain we DO have a filter and have had one since they signed up and that some will always get through no matter what. (You that important? Hire someone to read your email for you and do the screening.) They care if they get an extra 4 per day, but think that the filtered state is the status quo. They have no idea there is lots and lots going on that gets stopped before it gets to them.

I think a big day of virus/kiddie porn spam/nigerian spam/ etc. would get all the "normals" half a clue and they might shut up for a while or call their legislator do ask that something better be done.

Re:I say let the spam come

[arivanov]

You assume that your customers won't leave en masse because "my sister just sent an email and it didn't get here 30 seconds later".

They will not.

• First of all, some real world examples to back my statement: Yahoo greylists like crazy and has a vicious positive feedback loop which raises values for dodgy sites up to several hours. Anyone seen packs of users leaving it? I know a few more ISPs which greylist (I have helped them put it in place) and they have not observed any users leaving either.
• Second, a well behaved implementation will cache greylist entries in a database and adjust lifetimes based on site/user message rates and spam scores. As a result you may have some initial delays, but no delays between common correspondents in a steady state.
• Third, if you deploy it correctly you will not have any initial delays either. It is trivial to train the system for a week or two before deploying it for real. All you need to do is to put all the ACLs and check statements in your config without the final defer/reject. 1 week of mail traffic will set the steady state nicely. After that you enable the defer and have a working implementation without 99% of the users noticing it by anything, but the decrease of SPAM.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Pollardito]

I think most internet users still remember what it was like before spam filtering became common. Wait a few more years. Then users will take the filtering for granted.

actually, i think a lot of internet users will still have Hotmail at that point

Re:I say let the spam come

[teknosapien]

I don't think Spamhaus would be this irresponsible, nor do I believe they should be, at one time I may have. Maybe the better thing to do would be to send statistics to the Judge, in a format he can understand. Maybe the numbers will speak for the case. If the numbers are as they say then the impact would be much greater than email servers, there would be a sever lack of bandwidth causing more serious problems. Maybe stop providing the services to the Judges email service this would minimize the impact on the rest of us and send a clear message to him. (Proposed_Order_Kocoras@ilnd.uscourts.gov ) If that fails then yes, I would probably say shut down for a day or two but that should be a last resort

Re:I say let the spam come

[Blakey Rat]

If I hire a person to perform a service on my behalf, they are ME. There's no difference between "Spamhaus's lawyer screwed up" and "Spamhaus screwed up." That's my exact point. It's tough luck that they hired a bad lawyer, but they have to deal with the consequences... they can't just sit here and fear-monger without addressing the court case.

Re:I say let the spam come

[TheRaven64]

If you screw up at something, whether it be hiring bad lawyers or anything, you can't just put your hands over your ears and shout, "la la la I can't hear you!"

You can usually appeal on grounds of incompetent representation, however.

Re:I say let the spam come

[arminw]

.... then you are exposed at least up to the limits of that money amount.....

So then is this case the court can take any money that Spamhaus has or will have in the USA, but that's about all. If anyone brings whatever into or does whatever onto US soil, then and only then does a US court have jurisdiction. If the US and a particular foreign country have a treaty or agreement on a matter, the foreign court, as a representative of that government is obligated to enforce the decree of the US court because of the treaty. That's how extradition works in cases of criminality. The accused, whether criminal or civil is still generally entitled to a hearing in his/her home courts first. AFAIK there is no treaty concerning spamlists.

Big international corporations are able to buy politicians in many countries to pass laws and treaties in their favor. Copyright and DMCA type laws come to mind here. Even so, if someone like M$ wants to pursue a megapirate in some asian country, they have to use the courts there to enforce the laws or treaties of that country.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Henk Poley]

What you could do, is use Bluefrog from Blue Security. Except that service is not available anymore. But it did work. There are people working on more reliable replacement services.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Frog

Re:I say let the spam come

[TheRaven64]

Do Spamhaus do business? I use their service, but as far as I am aware it is free. From the first line of the 'About Spamhaus' page:

Spamhaus is an international non-profit organization...

Doesn't sound like they 'do business' anywhere. Spamhaus publish material in the UK which some people choose to use from the USA. Why would the USA have any more jurisdiction against it than Iran would have over a porn site hosted in the USA?

Re:I say let the spam come

[DoomfrogBW]

It's called the Long-arm statute. Most, if not all, have this statute so say someone in Maine can sue someone in Texas. With the long-arm statute, if there is no parent company in the US, the papers can be served to the Illinois Secretary of State. The Illinois Secretary of State then forwards these papers to the parent company in the UK, etc. Because the UK is treaty to the Hague Convention, they are privy to this serving. Now, the spammer may not collect on that million and it is simply a matter of principle. But since the UK is pretty good allies with US and if Spamhaus has any US assets, I wouldn't be surprised if they are seized and sold at auction or liquidated by the court in order to get this spammer their money.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone seems to be laboring under the false impression that removing the case to federal court somehow waived the right to object to personal jurisdiction. That is just wrong, and a two minute Lexis search shows how wrong it is. "[F]ederal courts have emphasized that "removal, in itself, does not constitute a waiver of any right to object to lack of personal jurisdiction . . . .") Nationwide Eng'g & Control Sys, Inc., 837 F.2d at 347-48 (citing Wright & Miller)." Hlavac v. DGG Props., 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 6081 (D. Pa. 2005). Even after removing the case, Spamhaus can legitimately contest whether the federal court has personal jurisdiction.

Re:I say let the spam come

[budgenator]

While "a district judge is not very high up the judicial foodchain" this particular judge isn't your "typical" district court judge and considering where he is, and the types of cases thrown at his court, he's a lot higher on the food chain than most of his peers at the distric court level. My personal hunch is spamhaus is delighted at his hearing the case, and may have made their "mistake" on purpose. When this whole thing blows up, no US court is going to want to touch a spammer vs. spamhaus case again.

Re:I say let the spam come

[cortana]

Why not? Are you going to pay for it? What if they can't afford it? Will you pay for their travel and legal expenses? Why should they have to care, since the only thing they stand to lose is control over the spamhaus.org domain?

Re:I say let the spam come

[Eccles]

Can you use whitelist filters on your hotmail inbox? For my office mail, 95%+ of the incoming non-spam e-mail gets shuffled off to another folder by one of many filters. The inbox thus has a fairly high percentage of spam, but typically is less important email anyway.

Re:I say let the spam come

[DoomfrogBW]

Yes, and they did not contest officially. Sitting back in the UK and snubbing your nose is not a way to officially contest the judgement. Rather, show up in court and challenge it. If you lose, then you use the US Justice System like everyone else: slowly.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Panoramix]

I hope it's like you say, because in the media it came more like this: ...

Funny. However, I think this is probably just delay in the media picking up the Spamhaus story. For instance, the last three stories about this on Slashdot concern with reactions and commentary, by different users and reporters, on a single Spamhaus press release. Both Steve Linford and Richard Cox have been asked to comment, and to the best of my knowledge, they've just repeated what can already be found in Spamhaus' answer to the proposed order:

Spamhaus.org's Spam Advisory List, the Spamhaus Block List, blocks 50 Billion spams per day across the Internet, therefore the effect of suddenly not blocking such a large amount of spam would mean that volume of unwanted junk hitting mail server queues all over the world. That in itself has a technical effect we can not properly estimate but would certainly cause very serious problems in most countries.

Technical issues aside, the vast majority of those 50 Billion spams are highly illegal, spam for drugs, extreme pornography, scams and bank phishes. The effect of 650 million email boxes (Spamhaus' userbase) suddenly receiving such a barrage of illegal spam, scams and bank phishes is, in my opinion, extremely dangerous. For this reason alone we believe that ICANN suspending spamhaus.org is almost certainly a no-starter.

What I'm saying is, I don't really think it is Spamhaus whining over and over about impending doom. They said their piece. Now it's the media slowly picking it up, with every new article coming through as if Spamhaus made yet another dramatic warning about the fate of a world without them.

But then again, what do I know? I just can't understand how some people can take a stand against Spamhaus. IMO they are the best asset the Internet has right now for keeping spam at bay; I know my job would be considerably harder without them, and my users would waste a lot more time digging through the junk. So Spamhaus gave the finger to some judge, and that was not the smartest thing to do. Fine. They probably should apologize to that judge or something. It doesn't change the fact that the judge should not have any authority over them. And I'd also say we should be helping them, not adding to their worries right now.

Re:I say let the spam come

[efalk]

Back when we thought Usenet could be saved, the spam-cancellers experimented with a 1-week moratorium on cancelling spam. Usenet was brought to its knees under the resulting spam load, and many servers simply crashed. It would be interesting to see what would happen if all the blocking services had a one-week moratorium today. I'd like to see the sys admins participate too, but their users would probably not stand for it.

As for e360 being spammers, there's really no question about that. A simple Google Groups search of news.admin.net-abuse.sightings turns up plenty of evidence of e360 spam being sent to spamtraps, role accounts, and other email addresses known with absolute certainty to never have opted in to anything.

Re:I say let the spam come

[R2.0]

You forgot #3: Go to District court, explain the situation to the judge about the bad solicitors, get the case remanded back to state court, THEN ignore it - all while having the first solicitors pay for it via their malpractice insurance.

Re:I say let the spam come

[tirnacopu]

Unfortunately spammers are ahead of you. Here's what I get thousands of times daily: http://generatia9.info/razvan/dealing.gif
It's an animated .gif which includes some small "noise" bits. It would surely bypass your OCR software. Should you adapt to catch this, they will probably find something else. I'm not saying you won't hurt them should you succeed, but consider this: you design your OCR software to analyze every frame in an animated .gif, to catch the offending text. What if the spammer uses the simple sprite-based animation to move pieces of text around? You honestly don't stand a chance.
Of course, this is from my very limited experience with the gif format. Any suggestions on catching these are warmly welcome.

Re:I say let the spam come

[budgenator]

"An amicus curiae brief that brings to the attention of the Court relevant matter not already brought to its attention by the parties may be of considerable help to the Court" wikipedia Maybe a couple hundred Amicus briefs filed by network and Email administrators all over the world would clue in the court as to the potential deleterious world-wide impact their proposed penalties might bring on international, interstate and intrastate commerce, and not to mention the benefitial effects it would have on illegal activities involve illegal drugs trade and fraud schemes. Hell it could easily be argued that eliminated spamhaus's services would be contary to US National Interests and Security.

Re:I say let the spam come

[budgenator]

Really now, a US court can order a foreign entity around? of course they can, actually I as an individual can do the same; I can shout orders untill I'm blue in the face! The real question is whether a US Court can enforce its orders, talk is cheap.

Re:I say let the spam come

[budgenator]

no No NO, you don't just go off with the full montey in one fell swoop, you ease into these things like starting out by blocking requests from .gov today, then .mil next week.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Lehk228]

you can maintain a whitelist using a firewall that sends incoming connections to a different machine or different port on the same machine.

Re:I say let the spam come

[mortonda]

ouch, that's a good one. I haven't seen any of these yet, perhaps other rules are catching them first.

The FuzzyOCR plugin is starting to work on animates gifs by using ImageMagik to break them apart, and I thought the noise stuff was getting better, but I haven't gotten anything out of this one.

At some point though, if the spammers introduce to much noise, even the few idiots that make spam profitable will not care to read it. I suspect this will even out.

Re:I say let the spam come

[linuxrocks123]

...or they could just ignore the court? After all, they're not under U.S. jurisdiction, and changing their name to spamhaus.org.uk doesn't sound like that big a deal to me.

You seem to be taking a very short-sighted view of this issue. Spmahaus is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, so if they failed to adequately respond to a U.S. court order, it's no big deal. Since the judge is threatening to do something very unfair, spiteful, and political - to pull their domain name, - and since this issue can be resolved by drawing enough political attention to the matter, sending out shrill press releases to draw attention to what this spiteful judge is doing is a completely valid strategy.

Re:I say let the spam come

[linuxrocks123]

> Correct, but if you operate a buisness in another country, you have to follow that countries laws. Ask Google about the Belgium case.

Spamhaus is not operating a business in the U.S. The rest of your post is therefore irrelevant.

Re:I say let the spam come

[linuxrocks123]

This is very interesting and I hadn't heard it before. Do you have a link for that?

Re:I say let the spam come

[RealGrouchy]

I'm sorry, what does this have to do with George W. Bush and the War on Terror?

- RG>

Re:I say let the spam come

[Bronster]

Each of our inbound mxes processes twice that quantity per day, and we reject fully 3/4 based on XBL/SBL. Spamassassin chews up a lot of Xeon processing time, and we're hanging out for Quad-Core machines, I can tell you.

Yeah, losing spamhaus would suck.

Re:I say let the spam come

[TapeCutter]

Sorry, I misspelt hammer.

Re:I say let the spam come

[dheltzel]

No offense, but that is truly an ugly hack. I *need* the ability to easily and reliably whitelist from a web app if I ever want any time off work. My co-workers are great, but not about to edit firewall rules to allow email through. IMO, firewalls should not be making email routing decisions, but "to each his own".

I will agree that once you have any system set up and working reasonably well, it gets hard to justify the effort and time to swap it out. There are enough projects demanding time and effort without adding things that have minimal payback. So if you're happy with what you're doing, there's no reason to "fix it" (not that my approval would mean anything anyway).

Re:I say let the spam come

[Lehk228]

it is an ugly hack, but it does allow for relatively CPU efficient filtering, and if you use this firewall only for mail routing it won't be a security problem to set up an internal web interface controlling the firewall.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Brandybuck]

I use IMAP. Unless my ISP filters at the server, it *ALL* ends up in my inbox.

Re:I say let the spam come

[SlackGirl]

Hell, if SA just detected animated .gifs and let me assign them 10 points, that would be fine with me. *Nobody* is sending me those legitimately. YMMV, etc.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Bronster]

We don't like Spamcop and their "you had a spammer sign up with you and even though they've since been booted we'll leave you listed for $N hours" policy. It's a nightmare for any service trying to make signups not-impossible in this world of stolen credit cards.

Switching away from any outbound IP that's been listed seems a workable workaround, but it's still really easy to DOS someone by signing up an account with them and emailing spamcop spamtraps to get them listed.

And yeah, they're blocked in postfix well before the LMTP delivery stage where spamassassin gets a look at it.

Re:I say let the spam come

[edunbar93]

I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter.

What, are you fucking stupid? We filter with an RBL *first*. And here's our stats from yesterday:

Total number of messages that attempted delivery: 209758
Total number of connections refused because of incorrect e-mail: 65851
Total number of messages refused by rblsmtpd: 91943
Number of messages rejected because they were spam: 24032
Number of messages rejected because they were viruses: 22
Number of messages that failed (probably No_mailbox): 3718
Projected number of messages actually delivered: 24214
Number of messages actually delivered: 13838

(Number of viruses is actually artificially low, since we've had to turn it off for most of our customers due to heavy load. We're getting more CPU power later this week)

Bouncing mail that comes from a blacklist takes up several orders of magnitude less CPU time than running heuristic tests on the text of the message. When you're dealing with this much e-mail, filtering with a blacklist first means the difference between a mail server that works and a mail server that doesn't. Especially when 50% of *all* your mail is coming from *known* spammers.

Re:I say let the spam come

[dheltzel]

What, are you fucking stupid?

Not at all. Thank you for such an insightful insult.

My "customers" require a much higher level of service than yours do and I can provide it, even if you can't. Computing power is cheap compared to the serious business issues of good email getting discarded. I'm sure that you realize that a certain percentage of email blocked by the RBL is not Spam at all, but in your case you simply don't care about that. I do, so I use a more targeted, intelligent approach. Yes, it takes a lot more computing power and I deal with less total email in a month than you get in a day. Still, calling it stupid just shows a lot of ignorance of real world issues on your part. Your mistake is assuming that everyone's email situation is like your's, and it's not. I'm guessing that you work for an ISP like ComCast or AOL, where abusing customers is not only OK, it's a sport. In some places, a lost email is really a bad thing, I'm glad for you that you don't have to deal with that.

Re:I say let the spam come

[Thundersnatch]

You, like many other DNS Blacklist supporters, assume that anything that was blocked by the RBL is spam. That is most definitely NOT the case. How many of the tens of thousands of messages you blocked were legitimate messages desired by your users? You'll never know... but I'll guarantee you it was above 1%.

Re:I say let the spam come

[SCHecklerX]

No offense, but I think we are a different class of company scale-wise. Some of the things we do today, their commercial offerings just began doing. Yes, RP has a good solution that is good for most places. We require the flexibility of their open source tools.

Something I didn't mention before is that we also implement greylisting. That has done much to reduce our spam load as well. My experiments on the home server with greylisting showed a dramatic decrease in junk I was having to process. Good stuff, but you'd be amazed at the amount of broken relays out there that treat a tempfail as a permanent failure and send an error to the original sender.

The technology is the easy part. To be a successful spam fighter you also need the following two process-driven items in place:

1. Accurate reporting on what is being filtered and why
2. A process your help desk can follow to properly have things whitelisted, or to escalate other problems to you (we get 1-2 a month on average. Not bad, especially compared to commercial offerings which would certainly probably lose a lot of legitimate mail).

Re:I say let the spam come

[WilliamSChips]

Hey, /., would it kill you to join the 21st century and let us edit our posts?

There's a reason you can't edit posts.
You could easily turn

This is an insightful post and should be modded up. I actually read TFA, use logic, make good posts, etc.

into

Are you GAY?
Are you a NIGGER?
Are you a GAY NIGGER?

And this is why you will never be able to edit your posts.

No, chances are I'm an intelligent person who can type fast, but /. will never consider that. Believe it or not, guys, we can compose a meaningful posting in less than 2 minutes. Please stop punishing good typists.

Although I'd prefer the limit be reduced to 90 seconds, that limit is needed or else we'd be crapflooded a good deal more than we have.

Re:I say let the spam come

[RockDoctor]

It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.

I think most internet users still remember what it was like before spam filtering became common. Wait a few more years. Then users will take the filtering for granted.

It might come as a surprise, but many internet users can remember what the internet was like before spam became commmon.

Trying to block spam is like...

[skoaldipper]

...tilling for weeds and replacing your entire front yard with rocks.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[dangitman]

I'd say it's more like trying to eat SPAM with a straw.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[ArsenneLupin]

no its more like fighting a virus with asprin. You can remove the symptoms but it takes more to remove the problem.

In the human body's case there are white blood cells and the like which actively remove problems.

Hmm, so what would be the equivalent of white blood cells? Baseball bats?

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[Anonymous Coward]

We should go to the source - those businesses who pay spammers. Right now they weasel out like "we don't spam, we just pay our associates for marketing services". That way they stay apparently clean. There should be a law that prevents such responsibility decoupling. Those who pay and are advertised MUST be responsible for their advertisments. They must be prevented from feeding money to spammers. Furthermore, those who buy goods offered thru spam should be persecuted. There should be a law against buying services or products advertised over spam and police should do like they do when hunting customers of prostitutes - send fake spam and arrest those who answer it. Then this small subpercent of "paying customers" would shrink further and spammers business model would choke.

In fact, direct marketing should be illegal alltogether, for all networking (spam, telemarketeering) and environmental (junk mail - all that paper, ink, fuel for postal vehicles) reasons. No society or civilisation can sustain all businesses sending personal notes to each person. It is not just annoying, it is insane.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[gomiam]

Furthermore, those who buy goods offered thru spam should be persecuted.

Ok, so let's make being stupid illegal. Your post was, IMO, right on track up to this. It is not illegal to buy through mail, and it shouldn't be. If anything, it might be illegal to buy certain products, but then it is illegal because buying those products is illegal, not because you buy them through mail orders.

Your analogy on hunting prostitutes' clients is, IMO, flawed: that is a service, not a product, unless you know of any prostitute that can be wrapped in gift paper and taken home to keep stored ;-)

Unsolicited direct marketing should be illegal, but... why should it be illegal that I want, say, my bank to inform me of new investment opportunities ASAP? Then again, most direct marketers would say their marketing was asked for. If so, then they should have some proof of it. If they don't, let the law fall heavily on them.

I dislike unwanted publicity (whatever the means) as much as anybody else, but I won't stand for having my ability to decide who can sell things to me restricted in the draconian way you propose, sorry.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[joto]

Ok, so let's make being stupid illegal. Your post was, IMO, right on track up to this.

For some reason, most people do not consider that as a realistic possibility. Personally, I think it should be illegal to be stupid, in a lot more situations than it is today.

This isn't exactly revolutionary. People are already being put into jail, for buying stolen goods, if the police can demonstrate that "they should have known it was stolen". And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder. And if you are a surgeon and kills a patient through malpractice, you are also in deep trouble.

The society needs more legislation against stupidity, not less. It's too easy to excuse away all the damage you have done, by putting up the "I'm stupid" excuse. So, yes, let it be punishable for up to n years in jail, to through stupid or uninformed actions, create life more profitable for spammers.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[gomiam]

Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse for infringing it. But notice I have said ignorance, not stupidity. And there still is a difference between manslaughter and murder, fortunately. You wouldn't want to be sentenced to death because you killed someone without trying to (knowing you did is, for most people, quite a punishment in itself).

Perhaps you should be prosecuted if you ever are scammed, even if you didn't know you were being scammed. Let's lay the blame on the victim, while we are at it, shall we? I think you don't really want to make this extreme point, but that's where you get in the end when you talk about "legislation against stupidity". It's a slippery slope.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[gomiam]

No, I'm not basically correcting you to anything. I'm saying your solution is wrong, and that you should try and find a better one. Please don't get so riled up about it: I know what the problem is firsthand, I'm the one over 300 people in a faculty go to when their mailboxes start to fill. Although that won't let me jump blindly at the first solution presented.

Why all of us must suffer mail servers' congestion because some bozo...

Why must any of us suffer being prosecuted because somebody else bought a car in our name?

From the beginning this has been a technical problem, and it must be sorted out by technical means. See how much good the current IP legislation has done to curtail copyrighted material downloads.

But if you persist on supporting and awarding network-clogging practices, prepare to be persecuted in magistrate court.

So if an invoice shows up with my name on it while cleaning up a spam operation, I'm automatically in trouble? If that were so, any buyer of stolen goods would automatically be an accomplice. Fortunately that is not so.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[portforward]

Oh, so trying to block spam is like living in Tucson Arizona?

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[LoveGoblin]

Ok, so let's make being stupid illegal.

But what would happen to Slashdot?!

/oblig

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[joto]

There's an old saying: "You can't fool an honest person". Yes, I support prosecution of people who are scammed. Most scams are so obvious that even if you fail to see that it's a scam, at least you must have known it might be illegal in some way. I fail to see what you mean by "even if you didn't know you were being scammed". If you knew it, you wouldn't be scammed, right?

As for blaming the victim, well, in a lot of cases, the "victim" is the person who did the stupid thing in the first place. It's called taking consequences of ones actions. Leaving the car door unlocked? Sorry, no insurance for you. Since you also made crimes more profitable, I see nothing wrong with the state punishing you for that as well.

On the other hand, if you are a victim, despite taking reasonable precautions, then it should not be punishable. The standard for this should be set through legislation and the court.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[Doctor Memory]

Personally, I think it should be illegal to be stupid, in a lot more situations than it is today.

Nah, like the man said: Let's just remove all the warning labels from everything and let the problem sort itself out.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[Phroggy]

And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder.

If it was accidental, isn't it still vehicular manslaughter, not murder?

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[Tielman]

"..if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder."

In Miami, someone killed a U.M. student, injured her friend and ended up paying ~$150 for the "running a red light" ticket. There may have been some "probation" for a year or the like, but that was it.

Sorry, but it's not murder, it's just a ticket (sometimes).

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[mooingyak]

I thought it would really neat if your post went unresponded to, but the joke is probably way too subtle. So I replied instead.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[gomiam]

OTOH if you pay someone who uses spammers' services but in that process spammer has no stakes, you are in clear. So, if your actual purchase indicates a spammer anyhow, you should be held responsible.

So, if I actually spam you and act as a middle-man, your purchase is legit? I somehow can't see the logic in that.

That is why it is recomended that police set up their own "agent provocateur"...

Great: in order to protect the law, they break it. Now that makes so much sense.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[gomiam]

There's an old saying: "You can't fool an honest person"

That saying is beautiful, simple... and wrong. Everybody can be fooled. Prosecuting people being scammed is akin to prosecuting assault victims for "walking on the wrong side of town", senseless.

Leaving the car door unlocked, again, is a flawed analogy. And so is the consequence you mention: there's a difference between not receiving insurance money and actually being prosecuted because you forgot to lock your car (it's so unusual, I can't fathom why carmakes have started to make it automatic).

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[FecesFlingingRhesus]

You have the right attitude but the wrong solution.

And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder.

Stricter guidelines and requirements to get a license would be a good solution to this problem.

if you are a surgeon and kills a patient through malpractice, you are also in deep trouble.

Not everyone is cut out for higher education. Maybe we are letting the wrong people into med school. We allow morons to do more and more every day under the name equality. It a fluffy idea that we are not all different and that everyone can be a brain surgeon because we are all the same. I don't buy the bullshit and I say instead of making stupidity illegal let's stop being idiots ourselves and stop empowering stupid people.

Re:Trying to block spam is like...

[alienw]

Furthermore, those who buy goods offered thru spam should be persecuted.

to persecute: to oppress or harass with ill-treatment, especially because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or beliefs.

Yeah, let's oppress those who buy spammed products for their race and religious beliefs.

Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Kris_J]

I am so ready to walk away from email. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[crazyvas]

Dude,
I am so ready to walk away from cars. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from television. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from radio. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from life. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from my legs. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Solder Fumes]

There is no alternative. As soon as any method becomes popular enough to be useful, spammers will move in. Sure, you could use IM, but spammers are there already. You could set your IM client to only accept messages from known users, but you might as well go back to email and set up a whitelist.

Let's get to the very root of this problem: spammers can send as much email as they want, with very little penalty in cost. This problem could be solved if some kind of postage system was applied to email. It's been said before, and it's always beaten down in this community because it appears to fly in the face of Free ideals. Well, everyone here is already paying for their internet connection, for their computer, for the power to run it. I'm sure some method for postage could be devised that still maintains a level of privacy.

And to be honest, I'd be interested to see what effect this would have on supposedly valid emails. Perhaps that weekly newsletter would have a little more thought put into it. Maybe Aunt Patty wouldn't forward the same joke that's been going around since 1997. Corporate internal email would be unaffected, unfortunately.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[dangitman]

Don't spammers tend to use hijacked and zombified PCs, not their own mail accounts?

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Solder Fumes]

Maybe people would start to get a little fucking common sense when they discover a fat spam bill in their mailbox after they've ignored security warnings one too many times.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Stellian]

There is no alternative. As soon as any method becomes popular enough to be useful, spammers will move in. Sure, you could use IM, but spammers are there already. You could set your IM client to only accept messages from known users, but you might as well go back to email and set up a whitelist.

Yeah, but you can at least try to design a system that is spam resistant, as opposed to a 30 years old design that is extremely spam friendly.
I use IM for 4 years now (Yahoo) and I've never received a single piece of spim. And I don't think it's because spammers haven't tried, or because Yahoo messenger is not popular enough.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[misleb]

Why? Modern filtering systems are pretty good. There is no reason why you, as a user, should be recieving much more than a few spams per week. It is kinda ugly for admins, but that is just part of the job.

-matthew

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Solder Fumes]

It's because you have no friends.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[RMH101]

Your company advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
() The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[rar]

Easy. We just need to set up a protocol where an ISP is charged $0.01 per email sent. That will kill the spammers without having any real effect on people sending email.

Actually, the problem is not this simple. Spammers today send their emails from millions of hacked computers worldwide. They will just continue to do so, and these charges will drop on the clueless users whose computers are used to send the emails.

As long as computer security is as bad as it is today, there just is no easy solution to spam. All hyper-clever ideas about encrypted network id:s, black and whitelists, hashcash, etc, are just temporary solutions --- they only serve to drive the spammer to more intensly use the fact that a hacked computer also gives access to an online identity.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[BenjyD]

With a well-trained Spamassassin filter, Postfix's UCE controls and Mail.app's junk filtering, about 10-20 spam a day made it into my inbox, out of maybe 300-400 total. I just switched to my ISP's servers with their filters instead and I see about the same numbers.

The annoying thing is not so much the direct effects of spam as the indirect things like the fact that I can't use a wildcard address because it will be bombarded with dictionary attacks, or the possibility of false positives.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[coyotecult]

I use IM for 4 years now (Yahoo) and I've never received a single piece of spim.

I have. Also, Yahoo IM is NOT a decentralized system, so I don't think it makes a good example. (There might be good examples out there; Yahoo just ain't one of them.)

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[joshetc]

I say exactly. If all these clueless people are getting zombified PCs that are sending SPAM get billed for it they will either:

a) fight the ISPs forcing them to take a loss and do something about spam
b) Learn to secure their computer
c) Stop using their computer all together
d) Pay the fee and continue on for an undisclosed period of time at the end of which they will have to choose again

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[goldseries]

You can't get away from e-mail. It is even killing of blue postal service mail boxes.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"As soon as any method becomes popular enough to be useful, spammers will move in. Sure, you could use IM, but spammers are there already. You could set your IM client to only accept messages from known users, but you might as well go back to email and set up a whitelist."

a. I'd love to have that whitelist right now.

b. I've been using ICQ and Yahoo for years. I've recieved one SPAM in the last two years. I don't know what's being done to keep the SPAM down, but man I appreciate it. (I'm using Trillian, if that matters.)

YMMV, but I prefer using ICQ to correspond with people.

"Let's get to the very root of this problem: spammers can send as much email as they want, with very little penalty in cost."

In my humble opinion, the main problem is that anybody can send a message to anybody else. It's too open. Too many servers configured differently. No standard white/black list, etc. I'm curious what would happen if it was decided to completely scrap email as it is today and start it from scratch. My guess is they'd borrow ideas brought to us by instant messaging. Contact lists, invites, authorizations, etc.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[dangitman]

Unlikely. Common sense is rather uncommon.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[rbarreira]

I am so ready to walk away from cars. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Here.

I am so ready to walk away from television. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Here.

I am so ready to walk away from radio. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Here.

I am so ready to walk away from life. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Here.

I am so ready to walk away from my legs. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

You can't walk away from your legs. Not with the same legs, at least.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[RAMMS EIN]

``My guess is they'd borrow ideas brought to us by instant messaging. Contact lists, invites, authorizations, etc.''

Spammers now send their messages in MSN and ICQ invites/authorization requests.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[RAMMS EIN]

``Actually, the problem is not this simple. Spammers today send their emails from millions of hacked computers worldwide. They will just continue to do so, and these charges will drop on the clueless users whose computers are used to send the emails.''

You're saying that as if it were a Bad Thing, but is that actually true? It will certainly give people an incentive to secure their computers, and the whole world will benefit from that (seeing that the vast majority of spam and malware are propagated by compromised PCs).

Of course, it's rather harsh to slap unsuspecting users with $10000 email bills all of a sudden, but there's a solution for that, too: insurance. With premiums dependent on how good a job you do at securing your systems, this will preserve some of the incentive to secure the systems, while taking the harshness out of the system.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[somersault]

Why should someone have to pay insurance premiums if they're not a pr0n obsessed IE user? Or am I missing something here? I think there should maybe be a $1000 limit to the fines each month to take away the 'harshness', then people may wake up and learn to use their computer sensibly.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so ready to walk away from cars. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Never owned a car in my life. It's called a bicycle, and public transport. Yeah, yeah, so you live in the USA where those hardly exists. Sucks to be you.

I am so ready to walk away from television. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Been doing without for four years. No ill effects, lots of extra free time. DVDs are watched on my computer.

I am so ready to walk away from radio. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.

Been doing without for six years. No ill effects, my music-ripped-from-CD collection is large enough to offer much better variety than any radio station ever did, and I'm completely free of annoying jingles.

Don't see the need to walk away from life or my legs just yet, but I'm sure that if you really want to, you'll find a way

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[ScepticOne]

You can't walk away from your legs. Not with the same legs, at least.

Nonsense! All it takes is some practice (ok, a lot of practice), and you can walk on your hands! Not a great solution, admittedly, but a somewhat workable one...

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Eivind]

I would consider that a good thing. If people *noticed* that their computer sent a million spams in the last week, the chances would be much better that they actually did something about it.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[87C751]

In my humble opinion, the main problem is that anybody can send a message to anybody else. It's too open.

Yeah, we can't have just anyone talking to just anyone else, can we? Where would that lead?
</sarcasm>

I don't know what the ultimate answer to spam is, but walled gardens aren't on the list.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Kris_J]

It is kinda ugly for admins, but that is just part of the job.

I'm an admin :(

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[planetmn]

Do you think burglary victims should be fined for being the victims of a crime?

Blaming computer security is like blaming door locks for burglaries. Fact of the matter is, nobody should have to secure their computer, unfortunately, we live in a world where people will take advantage of people all too quickly. The blame for spam lies solely with the spammers. Not with Microsoft (as much of Slashdot would like to believe), not with the avg computer user who doesn't have a completely secure machine.

Security is like DRM, is like speeding tickets, etc. People will always find a way around it. As long as you are going to allow the average user of the internet to send email, there will be a potential way in for a spammer.

Please stop masking the real responsibility for spam by blaming it on the grandma and grandpa just trying to email their grandchildren. The blame rests with the spammers, period.

-dave

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[slackarse]

You can't walk away from your legs. Not with the same legs, at least.

Here.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[arose]

It should be easier once the feet are gone!

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[alx5000]

You can't walk away from your legs. Not with the same legs, at least.

... and sever, and server, and sever, and roooooooooll, roooooooooll....

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Alchemar]

STAMPS

http://www.usps.com/

Worked for years before email.

Snail mail too slow try ma-bell, instant comunication to anywhere in the world.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[rar]

Do you think burglary victims should be fined for being the victims of a crime?

Actually, at least in my home country (Sweden), they already are: for example if a burglar gets access to wepons that should have been stored in a more secure way (usually a specific locked cabinet) they can be found guilty for this. I belive that is a reasonable law.

However, I didn't say that I want to punish clueless computer users. I just want fewer hacked systems on the Internet becuase I belive that is the only way we eventually can get rid of spam.

The blame rests with the spammers, period.

And the blame for murder lies with murderes. But that does not mean that we shouldn't take steps to prevent neither murder, nor spamming.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[esme]

Better yet, email servers should refuse to accept email unless the sender has been configured to pay them $0.01 for each message it is trying to send. There are some cases that aren't handled very well by a system like this (such as mailing lists), but those could be handled by setting up a refund system where the $0.01 would be refunded unless the user marks the message as spam. This would have the added benefit of encouraging opt-in email lists when you sign up for accounts, etc.

Maybe the spammers would just start using phishing to get the financial details of people to configuring their zombies to be able to pay for messages sent. This would suck for the phished, but at least that would be wire fraud, which would kick the spammers up into the racketeering/conspiracy/mafia-type laws which have real teeth.

-Esme

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[sholden]

A fair number of jurisdictions have gun storage laws - by which failing to secure a firearm is a crime. Of course getting some spam is nothing like being shot (I assume, never having been shot).

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[rar]

Since you seem to be asking for feedback:

Imagine person A dislikes person B. Person A has access to a massive amount of hacked broadband computers. He does not use these computers for something 'bad' in the normal sense (no spamming etc.). He furthermore runs a modifid ThreatNet software on these hacked systems to act as usual, but also to mark and propagate 'B' as bad.

You are 'B'. How would you protect yourself against this attack?

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Ginger Unicorn]

hahahahahah, if i had the points, i'd mod you up

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[AaronLawrence]

This famous checklist is a useful thing to have around, but IMO not a decisive answer to any spam suggestion. It is very likely that we will have to compromise on one or more of those ideals in order to make progress.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[lophophore]

I don't think that email postage will help.

Most spams have forged (fake) return addresses, and are inserted into the network through methods that are often illegal. So what would stop the spammers from using forged or stolen email postage?

I think a better solution would be to have a method to verify that the sender is authentic; that the return address is real, and that the person who sent the message is a legitimate user of the ISP that originally accepted the message. This could work like a "web of trust" where the ISP's mail server knows and vouches for the users, and upstream servers known and can vouch for the downstream servers. Admittedly, this would require changes to the RFCs and probably all of the mail handling software on the internet.

However, without a fix soon, email will become completely unusable. So I think this is a pay to fix now or pay more to fix later scenario.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Anne Honime]

How optimistic ! I've seen on webforums people actually complaining their ISP blocked their account for spamming because they had been trojaned, and brag the crowd it was unfair and the ISP should have protected them from trojans in the first place. The wanted vindicatively their connection back, no matter what, and got along the lines of "if a pirate had truely used my computer, I sure would have noticed ; antivirus ? What for ?". But the more disturbing part of the act was that other readers were actually agreeing with the retards ! People are incredibles.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[misleb]

With a well-trained Spamassassin filter, Postfix's UCE controls and Mail.app's junk filtering, about 10-20 spam a day made it into my inbox, out of maybe 300-400 total. I just switched to my ISP's servers with their filters instead and I see about the same numbers.

Well, I have a similar setup and my users don't see half that. There is something unique about your email address. Is it something like bob@domain.com? Is it published as your website contact without proper obfuscation?

-matthew

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[BenjyD]

There are several email addresses forwarding to that one, one of which was openly available in a public directory at a university for years and gets a lot of spam. A lot of the spam was directed towards aliases I used to subscribe to FOSS project mailing lists, interestingly.

That was what I meant by indirect costs of spam, having to worry about where your email is published.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[nuzak]

It's worth noting that the checklist applies to ANY anti-spam approach, and it was written that way. It's a satire, and it's for sending to people who believe they've come up with the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (aka the FUSSP). No antispam solution is perfect -- the best we can do is provide a set of powerful tools that overlap each other to mitigate the problem into relative irrelevance. We're certainly not there yet.

I like this one better: http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.htm l

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[nuzak]

> Better yet, email servers should refuse to accept email unless the sender has been configured to pay them $0.01 for each message it is trying to send.

That would indeed solve the problem for the receiver, since it would stop receiving any mail, ever.

> Maybe the spammers would just start using phishing to get the financial details of people to configuring their zombies to be able to pay for messages sent.

How do you think spammers pay for their bandwidth in the first place? No, even zombies aren't free, they're rented from the controlling gang. Hardcore spammers are real and actual criminals, not just moderately sleazy hucksters.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[sjames]

it's always beaten down in this community because it appears to fly in the face of Free ideals.

It's been beaten down because it's an open invitation for half the world to try gaming the system to direct the profit to themselves, crush smaller ISPs, allow their particular spamming operation to continue while others are crushed, etc, etc. Email has enough problems with spam without adding turf wars, political wrangling, and another layer of lawyers and accountants to the mix.

Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative

[Eivind]

People are incredible. True. Nevertheless, people tend to take notice of events that directly impact their wallet. They may posture and complain about it in public, nevertheless if it is clear that ultimately they *do* have to actually pay for it, they are very likely to change their behaviour in the future. (quite possibly while all the time claiming that someone else is to blame).

My brother somehow managed to install antivirus, and managed to introduce the (then good-habit) of physically turning off the power to the modem while not surfing after a virus cost him $300 in calls to somewhere in east-asia. Sure he complained about it. Sure he claimed that someone else was to blame. But in the end, he adjusted his behaviour to reduce the risk of having to pay for similar crap in the future.

Two lists needed

[Ed Avis]

Maybe some legal problems could be avoided by having two lists. One, a list of spammers. The second list is people who are not spammers (cough) who have threatened or engaged in legal action to be removed from the first list. In other words a list of plaintiffs in court cases. Mail server admins could choose whether to use one list or both for blocking mail.

Re:Two lists needed

[penix1]

"Maybe some legal problems could be avoided by having two lists."

I agree with that except that I would use one for spammers / zombies and one for spam supporters. From what I read at spamhaus, e360 isn't a spammer but a spam supporter / enabler. By having both categories in one list, it puts pressure on the spam supporters but also affects innocent 3rd parties that get caught in the middle. I think this would also cut down the Joe Jobbing that is going on.

OTOH, spamhaus has always said they go after spammers AND spam supporters so IPSs that use them should be aware of this.

This whole thing is silly. Not only the complaint but the response by spamhaus. They were sued earlier in Florida and they responded. When it looked like they were going to get discovery the other side dropped their suit. I don't know if they got their legal fees covered (something I highly doubt since the US doesn't have a "loser pays" system). I suspect the same or similar would have happened here. In the least, they should have agrued the jurisdiction. I chalk this up to stupidity on both sides. And no, it doesn't require them to go to the US to have US legal representation. That argument is bogus. They knew about the suit and decided to ignore it instead of fighting it possibly with a counterclaim or two. They have enough evidence to support the listing. I just don't get why they ignored this one and responded to the Florida case.

B.

Re:Two lists needed

[nine-times]

Why go through all that? If it's really an issue of this company complaining that they don't think it's fair to label them "spammers", then how about we just call it a list of "people you probably don't want to receive e-mail from". "Spammers" or not, you don't want e-mail from these guys.

It would have some benefits too...

[Analein]

Millions of men would experience an undeniable growth in penis size, everybody would be rich because of these nice fellows in your average third world country and being happy is out of question as long as the Xanax/Oxycontin stocks are full.

Die, Spamhaus! Die!

Insult

[doobie22]

This whole case is an insult to an other country's laws.

what else can you do?

[grapeape]

Maybe spamhaus going dark for a bit will be enough to wake people up to the problem a bit more and maybe finally get people working on a solution. Im all for registered mail (whitelists) or even pay to send email within reason.

I have a client who complains daily about the amount of spam she recieves (4-6 a day) and takes probably half an hour a day forwarding each of them to me along with rants about them. I have tried to explain that if she would parlay that half hour into about 5 seconds of clicking the delete button she would save herself alot of grief. She just wants it all eradicated, and frankly I dont think its really possible with an open email address. She will download things like weatherbug and signup for webshots or any other "free" service without regard to what "free" means when it comes to the web. I have tried explaining that you simply cant stop all of it and that level of spam control I have been able to maintain in far superior than most, but she insists I just dont know what im doing. The latest problem has been with image spams regarding penny stocks. The source shows basically nothing filterable, anyone ever find a way to deal with those?

I am now evaluating a Deep Six spam box to see if that helps but with what little is trickling through now I dont see alot of improvements, im already catching hundreds a day without it.

Re:what else can you do?

[rolfwind]

I agree.

I do this and this is the best she can do: have a private (like Gmail, from what I have seen, they have the best filters) account only given to trusted friends with the instructions that they never give it out to anyone else, and an open account to give out to anybody else, including various sign-ups. If she is careful, she will have no problems on the one account. If she is not. Well....... she will see that even google can't stop spam for her.

I don't think there is much you can do with such a stubborn person: but next time she calls you incompetent, ask her if she has ever recieves junkmail in her snailmail and why it all isn't eradicated yet.

Re:what else can you do?

[NoSuchGuy]

The latest problem has been with image spams regarding penny stocks. The source shows basically nothing filterable, anyone ever find a way to deal with those?

Use Spamassassin with the "HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_xx" rules

Re:what else can you do?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The source shows basically nothing filterable, anyone ever find a way to deal with those?

No they pretty much get in every single time. I was really impressed with Thunderbirds junk mail filter until those started getting in. They simply can't be caught with current technology.

Re:what else can you do?

[somersault]

lmao.. a new verb is born :)

Re:what else can you do?

[Kjella]

I have a client who complains daily about the amount of spam she recieves (4-6 a day) and takes probably half an hour a day forwarding each of them to me along with rants about them.

Ignore them. There's always people like this and they can't be pleased, use your five seconds to hit the Delete button and save yourself a lot of grief. If she wants to sign up with another service, let her. People that are hogging the support lines (particularly with trivial things like this) are rarely profitable anyway.

Re:what else can you do?

[B1ackDragon]

Photocopy a bunch of your junk mail every day for a week (credit card offers, sweepstakes, fliers, etc.) and write a little rant with each one and send it to her. :-D Of course, you have to write it under the guise that you think she can do something about it.

Re:what else can you do?

[vittal]

You could try the FuzzyOcrPlugin for SpamAssassin
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/FuzzyOcrPlugin

Re:what else can you do?

[AaronLawrence]

how does this help with the (most common) case where the spammer includes a bunch of text from a story or web article in with the image?

Re:what else can you do?

[AsnFkr]

Dude, shut off the spam filter to her email address for a day to show her what you are doing for her. She might understand once she seems how many you actually stop for her.

Re:what else can you do?

[Phroggy]

Look for a SpamAssassin plugin called "FuzzyOcr", it uses the "gocr" optical character recognition software to convert the image to plain text, then does a fuzzy string comparison to match against close approximations of a list of keywords. The OCR software isn't very good (don't use the stable version, use the latest developer version, it's stable enough) and the way the string matching works there's a significant possibility for false positives (especially if you e-mail someone a screen shot, that happens to contain some text - any text at all), but so far I haven't had a problem with false positives, and it definitely catches a lot of spam. It does various filters on the image before sending it to the OCR software, so it catches things like the animated GIFs with what look like tiny bits of colored thread scattered throughout.

Re:what else can you do?

[Richy_T]

Or gradually crank up the amount of spam you let through over a period of weeks until you get to 100% then tell her you're about to install a new spam filter and crank it back to the original setting. She'll be happy with you and you might even be able to bill her for the work.

Rich

Re:what else can you do?

[yuna49]

The FuzzyOCR plugin for spamassassin uses gocr to convert the image to text, then scores it based on the words it finds. This has helped a lot with gif spams, but there are still some that gocr can't seem to decode like this one: http://www.crystalmail.net/hgh.gif.

kdawson at it again.

[Inoshiro]

Here's the dnscache (part of the djbdns family) solution: /service/dnscache/root/servers# cat spamhaus.org
216.168.28.44
204.69.234.1
204.74.101.1
204.152.184.186
#

No need to HUP -- once the file is created and filled with those IPs, it'll pick them up automatically. You can easily install dnscache with the other tools on your mail servers for 0 interuption of service.

Cheers.

law

[bobby1234]

Law of the land vs Law of common sense. my money is on the law of the land.... (never bet on common sense... it is neither common nor makes sense)

Re:law

[purple_cobra]

Doesn't really matter if the land in question is a foreign land, does it?

Interesting

[stikves]

I still do not see how the courts manage to see "right to deliver unwanted messages" are as free speech, while ignoring the rights and monetary loss of others.

First while "sending" email is free, the cost of actual delivery (internet backbone) and storage (server admins) are handled by other parties.

And the spam which makes the ways to the inbox somehow causes loss of time, two times. First the time of the recepient who must carefully find "real" email which could be lost in the piles of junk. And the time of the programmer who must develop anti-spam technologies.

I guess the best "comprimise" would be "taxing" the e-mails somehow. So that the cost of 1,000,000 messages of a single sender will not be put upon the carriers and the recipients (the attitute is: you're sending me mail to store, so you must pay for it).

Re:Interesting

[91degrees]

First while "sending" email is free, the cost of actual delivery (internet backbone) and storage (server admins) are handled by other parties.

The financial costs of dealing with spam are exaggerated. We're assuming that the time taken 'dealing' with spam would otherwise be spent doing something productive.

The offence caused by spam isn't becuase it costs money. It's simply the rudeness of someone violating ones perceived territory in order to sell you something.

Re:Interesting

[jimmypw]

Somone should shout out "Spam!" every time that judge opens his mouth. If he tries to silence you, argue his own point against him. No doubt you'll be thrown out.

Justice has been served.

Re:Interesting

[KDR_11k]

That and wasting system ressources which has a legal precedent counting it as damage.

Re:Interesting

[penix1]

The financial costs of dealing with spam are exaggerated. We're assuming that the time taken 'dealing' with spam would otherwise be spent doing something productive.

That's the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Cycles spent filtering spam (both human and electronic) CAN be spent on other tasks. Whether it meets your definition of "productive" is irrelevant. It is still time and money invested that can be put to better uses than spam.

The offense caused by spam isn't because it costs money. It's simply the rudeness of someone violating ones perceived territory in order to sell you something.

It is because it costs money both in the form of wasted time and wasted processing that could be spent on other things. If it takes 15 minutes to weed through email deleting spams, that is 15 minutes wasted that can never be reclaimed.

B.

Re:Interesting

[91degrees]

I said "exaggerated". Not "non-existent". It doesn't cost as much as people make out.

And would you be neutral about spam that you personally receive if it took you 10 seconds per month, and required virtually no computer resources? Does the time itself really mean that much to you? Are all of your decisions in life based on a purely financial incentive?

Re:Interesting

[hey!]

Well, the one thing you don't do to a judge is ignore his court. Not unless you want to learn what the Latin term for "going ape-shit" is.

Spamhaus may have been unwise to make jurisdiction a matter of principle here. Given that e360 was either taking part in activities of questionable legality or assisting such activites, Spamhouse would have very little chance of winning the kind of injunctive remedies the judge has granted. The absolute defense provided by truth against defamation in the US means e360 has little or no chance of winning monetary damages. A countersuit might force a settlement or even recover the legal costs.

In short Spamhaus has give e360 the best possible scenario: default.

Spamhouse may have put themselves at a disadvantage if they are forced to appeal. At the very least I expect they'll need to eat a fat slice of humble-pie.

Standard disclaimers about not being a lawyer appy here, but I suspect Spamhaus may actually be wrong about jurisdiction. e360 is not bringing US law into a British court, it's the other way around. e360 is arguing for relief to damage done to their business in the US, and Spamhaus is arguing that UK law allows them to do this to a US business. If 419 scams were legal in Nigeria (which they are not), then would US citizens not be protected by US law? They might have a stronger argument if their service was restricted to the UK, but it is not; it is a service used in the US by US customers. That Spamhaus' actions affect a business in the US is probably enough to allow a US citizen to sue them for tort damages, but the fact that they are doing business in the US definitely is.

Re:Interesting

[general_re]

Well, the one thing you don't do to a judge is ignore his court. Not unless you want to learn what the Latin term for "going ape-shit" is.

Their new tactic of arguing that they're too important to be punished - and that's what this is, in effect - isn't likely to get very far either. "You can't suspend our domain; the internet will break!" Good luck with that.

Re:Interesting

[penix1]

It doesn't cost as much as people make out.

That depends on your definition of cost. To me, one second spent on removing something I didn't ask for, don't need, and don't want is a cost. Maybe not monetary but a time cost and I consider my time as valuable. Also, bandwidth and mail storage space isn't free even with "unlimited" service. I am paying for that bandwidth and don't want to have it wasted on something I am not going to keep.

And would you be neutral about spam that you personally receive if it took you 10 seconds per month, and required virtually no computer resources? Does the time itself really mean that much to you? Are all of your decisions in life based on a purely financial incentive?

I partly answered this above. Still, removing spam doesn't take 10 seconds a month when you get upwards of 50+ a day. Multiply that by 1,000+ if you are a postmaster. If it wasn't for computerized filtering, email would be unusable. Even with filtering it is still damned annoying when they get through.

As I said above, my time is valuable to me not just in a monetary way. I can think of a thousand better things to do than spend time deleting spam. Eventually, the signal to noise ratio will be degraded so far that email will be unusable by anybody.

B.

Hysterical claptrap

[91degrees]

Spamhaus has no idea how many spams it actually blocks. No idea about what other blocking mechanisms are used by its users, and only an estimate about how much email is spam.

Re:Hysterical claptrap

[deepb]

Spamhaus has no idea how many spams it actually blocks.

It's an estimate based on their query volume. That's certainly not going to produce an exact number, but it's way beyond having "no idea".

Bring it ON!

[nihaopaul]

holding the pipes and tubes to the internet screaming with his war face "BRING IT ON!"

now thats a slashdot experiance

Re:I work for a company...

[Silver Sloth]

I don't normally reply to AC posts, and, as this is a 'me too' post it will probably be modded redundant, but...

I can back up the AC's statement. I work for an IT multinational and our e-mail servers run close to the edge. If we were to see a significant increase in e-mail levels, be it x4 or x10, or even x2, our e-mail system would grind to a halt. We, along with every organisation have become totally dependant on e-mail. For example, one of our customers requires that financial information it sent to the Bank of England by close of play every day. It is sent using (encrypted) e-mail. A delay of a few hours would give us major headaches. And yes, we could use alternative methods but it would take some time to put these in place.

If the preditions came true it would be bad for us.

A day without spamhaus

[www.sorehands.com]

After the failed attempt of the illegal alien crowd to shut down the USA by telling immigrants to march on one day (they don't differentiate between illegal and legal), Spamhaus should try the same.

Have spamhaus pick a day and time to report empty lists from 9am to 11:59am on a Monday. Then lets see what Congress and the FTC says.

The FTC issued a report (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2005/06/adv1.htm) claiming that labelling spam would not be as effective as filters. If the idiots at the FTC and in Washington would feel the effect of spamhuas being down for a few hours.

Mandatory labelling os spam is effective. It would cut net traffic and processing time for some of the spam and make it easier to prosecute the illegal spammers.

I have many thoughts on the legal issues, but Steve Linford said not to discuss those as they may give the spammers idea. I will respect that.

Re:A day without spamhaus

[speculatrix]

Have spamhaus pick a day and time to report empty lists from 9am to 11:59am on a Monday.
Even better, all spamhaus need to do is report empty lists for IP addresses in the USA when they do the lookup. The rest of the world can continue, and the USAns get to keep their spam (which, it seems, mostly advertises produced and services in the USA anyway).

If the judge understood the internet, surely the only effective way to stop the effect of spamhaus would be to ban the *use* by telcos and ISPs of these blocking lists?

The only way to deal with spam, IMVHO, is to make it illegal to buy products from unsolicited sales messages - cut off the source of the spammers income. It's demand for dodgy services that feed the unethical businesses. Unfortunately, there's too much vested interest in Congress from big business to kill off all forms of unsolicited bulk marketing, whether by fax, telephone or email. br/ br/ Similarly, you can betcha bottom dollar that once the big casinos from Vegas have their own online gambling (calling it gaming is a deliberate diversionary tactic) will cause the laws preventing online gambling to be repealed.

Re:A day without spamhaus

[skoval]

> Have spamhaus pick a day and time to report empty lists from 9am to 11:59am on a Monday. Then lets see what Congress and the FTC says.

That probably won't effect them if their IT staff don't rely on spamhaus.

Re:A day without spamhaus

[davros-too]

Have spamhaus pick a day and time to report empty lists from 9am to 11:59am on a Monday. Then lets see what Congress and the FTC says.

I'd be very interested to see what happened. I have gut feeling the answer would be 'nothing'. Some people would get more spam, but the vast majority, I recon, would get about the same amount as usual. My feeling is that anti-spam is nearly as diverse as spam and therefore no single entity has a dramatic effect. Same as closing down a big spammer will not make much difference (actually, perhaps similar to a big drug bust not having much impact on the streets...)

I'd like to be proved wrong because that would mean the anti-spam people are actually having a noticeable impact, but unfortunately even their collective impact is low and so I would not expect to see that much impact from a single service shutting down.

Re:A day without spamhaus

[Cheapy]

"Failed attempt"? When that day happened, I was working at a casual food place and we were scared as hell about that day. I know that other places were the same too.

The point was made quite clearly to the people with the only real power in this nation: the corporations.

Re:A day without spamhaus

[Joe U]

Personally, I think there should be a day without any filters.

Just to show what a mess things would be WITHOUT any RBLs.

Use the UK server name!

[samfreed]

Use the UK domain system, e.g. http://www.spamhaus.org.uk/ . It works, and it's not subject to US law.

Re:Use the UK server name!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not at the moment you can't:

> 119.59.126.24.zen.spamhaus.org

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: 119.59.126.24.zen.spamhaus.org
Address: 127.0.0.4

> 119.59.126.24.zen.spamhaus.org.uk

DNS request timed out.
        timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
        timeout was 2 seconds.

Re:Use the UK server name!

[raind]

I got: > www.spamhaus.org/uk
Server: ns3.mindspring.com
Address: 207.69.188.187

Name: www.spamhaus.org/uk
Addresses: 209.86.66.95, 209.86.66.90, 209.86.66.91, 209.86.66.92
            209.86.66.93, 209.86.66.94

Re:Use the UK server name!

[speculatrix]

this is all well and good, but you're still dependent on the delegation of .uk in the root nameservers, so if the USA leaned heavily on Nominet the right way, they could force them to suspend spamhaus.org.uk, otherwise it would split the internet. At least ICANN is no longer entirely the USA's lapdog.

Re:Use the UK server name!

[PeterBrett]

You missed the point. The GP was simulating an blocklist lookup, whereas you just checked that you could get the IP address for the website. Looking up <suspect IP address>.zen.spamhaus.org returns an IP address (typically 127.0.0.4) if the tested IP is in the list, and unknown domain name otherwise.

Re:Use the UK server name!

[Digital Vomit]

...it's not subject to US law

It's sad how this statement is becoming more and more associated with freedom nowadays.

Re:Use the UK server name!

[pjt33]

Not entirely. Look at Guantanamo.

FTA: "the torrent of bulk mail"

[temcat]

Wow, looks like an innovative use of BitTorrent...

Re:SpamHaus users can use n.n.n.n form URLs

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloody hell.

It is called an IP address.

Interesting legal argument.

[cperciva]

I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all. So far their arguments seem to have been

1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.

While I do not doubt Spamhaus' credentials as really nice people, this is hardly relevant to the case in question.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[deepb]

1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.

Did you actually read this article, or any of the recent Spamhaus articles?

1. No, it should go to a UK-based court instead of a US-based court. Spamhaus does not operate in the US. The judge was lied to about this in order to push the case forward.
2. No clue what you're talking about (see #1). No federal court in either country has been involved.
3. No, they shouldn't be punished because the judge has no jurisdiction to do so. It's a matter for the UK courts, because it's a 100% UK (non-profit) company. Spamming is illegal in the UK, so good luck with that.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[91degrees]

It was a commentary on spamhaus' legal argument so far. Not an opinion on how things should work.

1. Spamhaus requested jurisdiction be moved to a federal court in this (PDF) document, thereby accepting jurisdiction of the court.
2. The Illinois District Court is a general trial court of the US federal court system.
3. Their ciurrent position - after losing horribly through inept legal arguments - seems to be that they're nice people.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, ignorance comes in many shapes and flavours. In this case, the flavour is 'mind-boggling'.

You appear completely oblivious to what the concept of 'jurisdiction' means. It is indeed true that the word can be defined in several ways, and _one_ way of defining it is 'you have jurisdiction over whoever you say you have jurisdiction over'. That should however be tempered by the fact that most legal systems specifically limit jurisdiction to acts related to that country or its inhabitants, and it is false to imply that the default jurisdiction of any court in any country is whoever the judge in question feels like exercising judgement over on that day. For the sake of record, I don't know the US rules for jurisdiction, but I do know that Spamhaus is a UK company with no employees nor operations in the US. I will therefore assume for your benefit of argument that US courts do indeed have jurisdiction over anything in the world.

That definition of jurisdiction is however a misleading one, as it excludes the concept of 'control' and 'power'. A US civil court giving a default judgement against a UK company is equally potent as a Nigerian court giving judgement against Microsoft - or even myself, that I bestow upon myself the power of jurisdiction over you. I could sit here on my couch and find a judgement against you - 'asshattery on Slashdot' - punishable by death - and the enforcement of the judgement would in your bizarre words solely be a practical matter!

Maybe it would be an assistance in your mind if you replaced 'The US' and 'The UK' respectively with 'Nigeria' and 'The US'? In this case, that a Nigerian court in which a US company did not bother to show found the US company guilty of something which is fully legal in the US (for the sake of example, let's say they are found guilty of 'depicting the Prophet Muhammed') to the tune of $500M. The US company would simply ignore it completely. It is bizarre and frankly completely inunderstandable that you can argue such a question is simply a matter of 'practical enforcement rather than legality' - for the main reason that in the United Kingdom THEIR ACTS ARE NOT ILLEGAL. US civil courts are equally irrelevant to the UK as Nigerian, Mongol and Congolese courts, and in this case the removal of the domain name is simply an illustration of the impotency of the court, as it futilely orders the demolition of millions of 'Yellow Pages' catalogues with the company's name in them because there is nothing else it can do.

I realise that this appears to be a lot of babble to you, all 'blah blah Jurisdiction blah blah Doing the crime but not wanting the time blah blah', but in reality it's not. This is why you lose, because what you discount as immaterial is actually material. Ultimately if the court do go ahead with this, there will simply be created an internet authority outside of US control, and the 'legality' of US judgements will be equally 'legal' and relevant to the world as the crazy ravings of an asylum patient in a third-world padded cell.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[phooka.de]

The interesting legal argument here is, that by pointing out that the case is (among other flaws) on a level of jurisdiction that surely can't be right, you voluntarily subject yourself to whatever that legal systems likes to come up with next.

The next interesting legal argument here is, that the judge seems not to be a judge, but a referee. His job is not to descide what's right and what's wrong, but to make sure the rules of the game are observed. They can't even descide that the case does not belong before them.

The last interesting legal argument is, that if the one who's sued doesn't appear, the one who sues gets all they want. Hell, they should have asked for a billion or two along with eevryone working for spamhaus and their children, relatives and frieds as slaves (for the next 7 generations). By the logic of the US legal system, they might just have won that as well.

Would I have appeared bofore them? And let the spammer force me and my non-profit organization to accept to be financially crippled by the spammer's for-profit ressources? No, I'd have shown them the finger as well (living in Europe and feeling there's a lot of nice areas for vacation that are on this side of the pool, so I don't really need to visit the US).

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[Viol8]

"Courts have jurisdiction over whatever the sovereign state that creates them says they have."

Heh , yeah right. Thats probably how the US courts would like it to be (as long
as it only applied to THEIR courts) but in the real world its another matter.

I think you'll find that a court has jurisdiction within the legal area it has
authority in.

Thanks for playing...

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[Peregr1n]

I'm starting to wonder about the sanity of Spamhaus' lawyers -- or if they really have lawyers at all.

No, they don't need lawyers. They're not in court; for the simple reason that it's a US court which has no jurisdiction over the UK. I suggest you read their response:

http://www.spamhaus.org/legal/answer.lasso?ref=3

1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.

No, they're not saying this. Even if it went to a federal court, it still wouldn't have any jurisdiction over a UK company. Note that e360's activities (while legal in the US) are undoubtably illegal in the UK.

2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.

No, Spamhaus have quite rightly never agreed that an Illinois court has power over a UK company. David Linhardt had to lie to the court in the first place to con the judge into believing that Spamhaus is an Illinois company.

3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.

No, they haven't broken the law - the only law broken in this affair is David Linhardt breaking UK law by spamming British citizens, which is why they haven't filed the case in the UK, which would be the proper place to do it if they had any chance of enforcing a judgement against Spamhaus.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[cpt kangarooski]

I disagree with your analysis. It's entirely possible to successfully argue that the case should be dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction. Of course, jurisdictional arguments aren't guaranteed to win on their own merits. For example, the mere fact that Spamhaus is based in the UK isn't really relevant here; what's more interesting is if they work with entities in the US, how much they do this, etc. But in any event, if you don't follow the right procedure for bringing this issue up, you waive it, and so personal jurisdiction ends up existing for a certainty.

As for the courts, yes, they are entirely capable of deciding that a case doesn't belong there, dismissing it, and suggesting that the parties refile in a different court, possibly even in a different country. Happens all the time. But it takes the right kind of case, argued the right kind of way, to get to that point.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[giafly]

You're actually agreeing with GP. You're both saying that anyone who is clearly not subject to US law nevertheless has to represent himself before a US court to establish this, which means everyone is in effect subject. And anyone who disagrees risks huge damages.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[Anne Honime]

spamhaus requested jurisdiction be moved to a federal court in this (PDF) document, thereby accepting jurisdiction of the court.

"thereby" is completely wrong ; a judge should assess his juridiction on proven grounds, even in the case a plaintiff or defendant doesn't rise an exception to it. A person is not supposed to know the law better than the judge.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[91degrees]

I'm sure the judge was well aware of the judgement in Hansen v Denckla where the court ruled that a transaction within the state can allows the state to excercise jurisdiction to a company situated outside of that state, and the precedent that if a defendant makes a genereal appearance in the court, then he submits to jurisdiction of the court.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[cpt kangarooski]

I don't think so. Whether or not someone is subject to US law is a matter of US law. Ease of enforcement is not the same as whether the law is applicable. Determining whether or not US law applies is thus a matter that you generally have to go to the US courts to determine (though n.b. that it's entirely possible and common for courts to decide issues based on foreign laws). Still, it is not difficult to go to a US court, argue lack of personal jurisdiction, and win, resulting in the case getting dismissed there, without having gotten into the merits of the case. So no, not everyone is in effect subject. But no one is automatically not subject either; you do have to argue your case. And disagreeing is no risk, since it's clearly no good to just let there be a default judgment, as Spamhaus has shown us.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[Anne Honime]

It's not because the US system is fucked up that any other system in the world should be.

Re:Interesting legal argument.

[R2.0]

"The interesting legal argument here is, that by pointing out that the case is (among other flaws) on a level of jurisdiction that surely can't be right, you voluntarily subject yourself to whatever that legal systems likes to come up with next."

No, you voluntarily subject yourself to the rules, procedures, and precedent of the level of jurisdiction you argued to be in. Spamhaus (via their lawyer) could have argued that the local court didn't have jurisdiction based on what everyone here is bitching about - UK based, no US assets, etc. One can do this solely for the purpose of arguing jurisdiction. BUT THEY DID NOT! The argued instead that ANOTHER court properly had jurisdiction, to which they made themselves subject, via hundreds of years of precedent including ENGLISH common law.

Spamhaus could have corrected the first error - the mistaken request for a jurisdiction change instead of dismissal based on lack of jurisdiction. But instead they have apparently hired lawyers not to fix the problem but to sue the first lawyers. So listening to how they can't afford lawyers seems a little thin.

Spamhaus is correct

[mabu]

Spamhaus is correct in saying that 90% of SMTP traffic on the net is spam. Based on my analysis we're seeing somewhere around 93%. People do not realize how much spam is blocked by relay blacklisting that never even gets to content-based filter systems. Virtually all major ISPs, including AOL, are heavily using relay blacklisting.

If Spamhaus goes down though, ten more RBLs will pop up. It's necessary to stop spam. And they're right... most mail servers on the Internet are not capable of handling the sheer amount of traffic if they were not also hanging up on bogus SMTP connections before even receiving content information. You ever wonder why your e-mail is delayed? This is because your ISP is queing mail processing because they can't handle it all at once. Without relay blacklisting, e-mail would be even slower and likely interrupted. I'm not suggesting that Spamhaus is that important, but what they do in theory, is.

All I can say is, pray that IPv6 doesn't get adopted or it will be even worse.

Re:Spamhaus is correct

[pilot1]

All I can say is, pray that IPv6 doesn't get adopted or it will be even worse.
Why? There will be more IPs, but if everyone has a permanent IP it will be easier to block offenders and infected machines.

Re:Spamhaus is correct

[cloudmaster]

I run two fairly high-traffic email servers. The "80-90% of email is spam" stat agrees with my findings. However, I do *not* run any kind of RBL, because I don't trust some third party to properly classify the mail I get. Using SpamAssassin, some IP blocking, some SMTP checks (valid HELO, etc), and general mail server setup, I block or correctly classify better than 90% of incoming spam. On the larger site, where I run dspam instead of SA, I'm well over 99% accurate on classifying spam/non-spam (partially due to an easier training system, IMO). On my personal site, where I get well over 1000 pieces of spam a day to my account, I only see one or two spams/day - the rest are caught without RBLs. If spamhaus goes away, I expect to see absolutely 0 impact. Furthermore, I expect most other "real" mail admins to have similar results. Overzealous RBLs like spamhaus aren't somehow critical to large companies, or the Internet as a whole, IMHO.

ICANN'T

[David Off]

This judgement, if followed through, would be a big blow for continued US governance of ICANN. The Free speech argument is good as afar as it goes but don't people also have the right not to listen to the message? The judge is effectively saying that if someone is spouting crap defended by the right of free speech he also has the right to restrain people and force them to listen to this message. That surely can't be right, even in the United States.

Re:ICANN'T

[KDR_11k]

Free speech does not affect private entities. Congress cannot restrict speech, anybody else can.

Re:I work for a company...

[Anonymous Coward]

have to agree with the above, i remember working for a large web hosting company 6 months back, fighting the rise in mail was like fighting the tide (and spam blocking was optional), a rise of 2 times the amount of email always caused delays which took a long time to filter through, one of the biggest headaches was customers complaining of delayed email (and they would phone as an order placed on their website 15 minutes ago hasnt come through yet).

if the amount of email traffic more than doubled for a day or 2 we would end up with weeks worth of backlogs as smaller isp's clog up (and even the bigger ones), then you would start losing email which is not acceptable to any business. most companies cannot upgrade their infrastructure fast enough to cope with this kind of thing.

these days email is expected to be instantaneous like a phone call, but if you were constantly being phoned by telemarketers when you were waiting for an important customers call someone would kick off, but for email it seems to be acceptable.

Suggestion to spamhaus

[rar]

Why don't spamhaus just remove the e360 adresses from their regular spam lists and add them to a new list named "addresses no longer blacklisted becuase we were sued and ordered to remove them"?

That list would then serve as a perfect permanent black list for all sysadmins who happen to think that people who sue spam lists might not be the kind of people who send worthwhile emails.

I would actually recommend even higher priority to that list in the spamassassin config file than spamhaus' regular blacklists :)...

Re:Suggestion to spamhaus

[Guppy06]

"That list would then serve as a perfect permanent black list for all sysadmins who happen to think that people who sue spam lists might not be the kind of people who send worthwhile emails."

Then you are assuming that nobody could have a legitimate claim aginst Spamhaus, worthy of a lawsuit. Just because this case may not pass the smell test doesn't mean none will.

Re:Suggestion to spamhaus

[rar]

Then you are assuming that nobody could have a legitimate claim aginst Spamhaus, worthy of a lawsuit.

No, I am not. I use spamassassins feature to tag emails with a spam probability, so I am only assuming that the fact that they have sued to get off the lists strongly correlates with me not being intrested in their emails. This is the same thing I assume for emails repetedly mentioning e.g. viagra. I don't assume that nobody ever could have a legitimate discussion of viagra, just that if they do, they better not do it in a spammy-looking way.

And if this assumed correlation is not valid for your email traffic, just don't use the "removed due to lawsuit"-list for email filtering.

Re:I work for a company...

[pimpimpim]

I just looked at the original post and started wondering if this trial and spamhaus' position in it doesn't show us something else than just the juridicial part: what if spamhaus would cease to exist due to some other reasons? (no funds, power outage, dDOS, boss gets convicted because he killed his wife, whatever). Isn't it a bit dangerous for all of us if such a huge amount of spam filtering only depends on one single organization alone? To parent: doesn't your e-mail department have a backup plan for the case spamhaus would cease to function for any reason?

Ok, maybe that's not completely fair, even if you had a backup filtering plan, the increase of initial load of mail coming in would be out of your control anyway. But still there might be room for spamhaus alternatives, or are there already? If so, why is everyone(?) using spamhaus then?

Buggy post

[TapeCutter]

Meanwhile the rest of the planet will treat an unenforcable court order from this judge about as seriously as they would a court order from the judge in this case.

GP was missing the link above.

Re:Buggy post

[ultranova]

Meanwhile the rest of the planet will treat an unenforcable court order from this judge about as seriously as they would a court order from the judge in this case.

But that's a remarkably good and just decision, actually. Fuck someone else's goat and you have to pay for it, after which the goat is yours and you are free to continue. And it also has an element of absurd humor in it :).

Seriously, can you think of a better judgement ?

Re:Buggy post

[pepeperes]

1. Go to Sudan 2. Have sex with other ppl's wives 3. Pay for them 4. Lots of wives! (Hmmm I am thinking of a few wives of other people that I know...)

Re:Buggy post

[R2.0]

Right idea, wrong application. Dowries are paid for daughters, not wives. So it would go:

"1. Go to Sudan 2. Have sex with other ppl's daughters3. Pay for them 4. Lots of wives!"

Unfortunately, selling ones daughters off for money is far too prevalent in some parts of the world.

Re:Buggy post

[TapeCutter]

Yes, but the point is would someone with a goat fetish in the UK take any notice if ordered to marry a goat by an African "judge"?

Where's the backup

[ledow]

OK, there's legal wranglings over the domain that you use for distributing this information.

This information is NOT illegal in the UK (in fact, the exact opposite).

So where's the backup .org.uk name, controlled by a British entity, that people who are worried about ANY downtime can use instead? I've seen ten or twelve press releases on this thing and not once a single mention of their contingency plan for if the world goes insane and the domain IS suspended (which they can fight about later).

In fact, why stop at one, why not have half a dozen, registered under different countries? Why not publish lots and lots of backup domains that work in an identical manner that everyone can plug into their systems NOW and then not have to worry about things like this ever again?

Or is the press generated by such an issue more important for spamhaus than their user's mailbox?

I understand the principle of fighting the case anyway and not giving in because of some loopy judge in the US, but seriously people - this is the computing industry. Where are your backups?

Re:Where's the backup

[ocelotbob]

Or is the press generated by such an issue more important for spamhaus than their user's mailbox?

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. Give the ${Gender} a cigar. The whole case smells of legalistic trolling, to be honest. By requesting the venue be changed to federal court, Spamhaus pretty much said through actions that they were accepting that they were under US law. Then, by not showing up for the court case at all, they accepted whatever punishment came down the pipes. Sounds to me like a planned move for some reasoning.

The more cynical side of me is wondering if they are playing this for political and/or economical reasons. They seemed to immediately tell people to blame ICANN for any possible shutdown when ICANN has said themselves that they aren't involved in this case at all; they can't shut down the domain, they have no legal bearing to stand either way on this case. Another part of me is thinking that perhaps this is all a money ploy. By playing themselves the victim, they stand to get a decent amount of sympathy money. Anyone in the UK know the laws on nonprofit financial disclosure? Can donations be charted by month, or is yearly the only level you can look at?

Re:Where's the backup

[ledow]

So because the system has no backups now means that it should go on without backups forever? Surely this should be the catalyst FOR registering lots of domains in different countries and making sure that EVERYONE uses them all. Then if one goes down (like this story suggests could happen), then no big deal.

If you're going to have to (potentially) change the config anyway, why not make LOTS of backups so that one massive change now (with the publicity behind it all) saves lots of little changes later?

Re:I work for a company...

[Silver Sloth]

It's an interesting aspect of the IT industry that, even more than in other industries, the winner wins. The most popular (insert application, OS, etc.) tends to grow at the expense of the others. Whatever your feelings on M$, most people buy Windows because it is the operating system, they use Winzip because it is the file compression utility, they search using Google because it is the search engine, and they use Spamhaus for the same reason. There have been plenty of well researched articles suggesting that the OS monoculture is dangerous and one of the reasons for the number of virii. Similarly, as you point out, the position of Spamhaus in the market leaves us vunerable.

However, what we do about it is another matter. Look how hard it is to persuade the world that there are alternatives to Windows. I wish I had the answer but I don't

Only one cure for spam

[kronocide]

I know people are going to love this... but after much thought I really only know one solid way to get rid of spam. That is by changing the system so spamming doesn't make any economic sense. Yes, what we need is a $0.2 tax on each email sent. As soon as bulk emailing has cost/benefit implications, spam is gone. Then, marketing has to work. The tax money could also be used for something good, like infrastructure development and upkeep.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[kronocide]

I meant to say $0.02...

Re:Only one cure for spam

[ocelotbob]

Or move everyone to a tax free system for messaging. Additionally, who would collect these taxes? How would an email message sent from England to Hungary be taxed? How about a webmail message where the webmail user is in the US accessing a French webmail server communicating with a German mail server ultimately read by a user in russia? Taxing email is just unworkable.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[kronocide]

That those things can't be solved off the top of one's head doesn't mean they can't be solved. There are other taxes, such as for air travel, that accumulate across nations and are paid in one place. And there is no better solution, because it exploits the one constant and real difference between spam and other email. Spam is the only email that is sent to 1 million addresses at a time. You could send 50 emails for $1, and that goes a long way to cover the monthly needs of normal people. But 1,000,000 emails costs $20,000. I believe it would kill spam overnight.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[SillyNickName4me]

Yes, what we need is a $0.2 tax on each email sent. As soon as bulk emailing has cost/benefit implications, spam is gone.

This sounds reasonable and yet it has been shown wrong for a long time:

It is economically viable for spammers to pay people for using their machines for sending spam, and this is something that is happening every day. As long as the price is not somewhat substantial, it won't do much about spam, and when the price is substantial enough it will also hinder normal email.

That it does not work should also be evident from all the junkmail arriving in your snailmailbox, which costs money as well,

Re:Only one cure for spam

[PopeRatzo]

Now we're getting somewhere: a progressive tax based on the number of adressees. But we're still looking at a technical solution here because what's to stop a spammer from sending one email a million times using a script? He'd get the low tax rather than the punitive one.

What about this: a tax of $50 per email based upon whether the recipient wants the mail or not. In other words, recipients can forgive a tax by selecting a button, like the REPLY button that says they wanted to receive that mail.

Unwanted mail has to pay to full price. This is a progressive tax based upon the utility of the email and the desires of the recipient.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[AvitarX]

It goes a long way to bankrupting some people too.

Homeless people use email as a vital way to keep in touch with family for example.

Also, the "digital devide" will be made much worse if moderate email use costs a signifigant portion of a months pay anually.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[kronocide]

It shouldn't bankrupt anyone. $0.02 per email (I made a typo in the first post) means you can include 5 or 10 emails in the hourly fee at an Internet café. For normal use, it wouldn't add up to anything significant. (As I said, 50 emails is $1.)

Re:Only one cure for spam

[kronocide]

I don't quite understand. 1 million emails will cost $20,000, so they would have to make +$20,000 for it to make sense to use that marketing channel. It doesn't matter who they pay, the ISP or the computer owner, or if they send all emails from one computer or from several.

The one real problem I can see is using hijacking software to send the emails from other peoples' accounts. But if that meant the computer owner got a bill for $20,000, that would be enough incentive (for both users and ISPs) to find new security solutions in a great hurry.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[SillyNickName4me]

I don't quite understand. 1 million emails will cost $20,000, so they would have to make +$20,000 for it to make sense to use that marketing channel. It doesn't matter who they pay, the ISP or the computer owner, or if they send all emails from one computer or from several.

Matter of fact is that there are spammers paying users for being able to use their computers right now, which strongly suggests that it is economically viable to do this, eventho there are ways to spam without such payment right now.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[Digital Vomit]

This would be a great system (assuming a more reasonable amount, like $0.01/email) if this was the only fee for internet access use. Period. A regular user could send out a hundred emails a day and still pay as much per month as he's paying now.

I, for one, would absolutely switch to a system like this.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[kronocide]

Okay, but I'm fairly sure they're not paying $.02 per email. The principle that would make this work is that there is a proportional cost for sending emails. That's when it stops making economic sense.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[Dunbal]

you can include 5 or 10 emails in the hourly fee at an Internet café.

      Arguing as if I owned an internet cafe - why the heck should I have to absorb the cost of your emails? This comes right out of my profits. Nope, the fees are going up, mister: $0.2 an hour plus some profit to justify my having to track and pay for your damned emails, call it $.50 an hour increase. Happy now?

      Postage hasn't stopped real world junk mail, why should it stop spam?

Re:Only one cure for spam

[StoatBringer]

This would not stop spam, as spammers use compromised PCs. It would be the innocent victim who is unknowingly hosting the spambot that suddenly gets the huge bill for the millions of spams his machine has sent.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[KingNaught]

Good becuase its there stupidity that cuased their pc to be compromised in the first place. If they had just kept their system up to date and not installed the smilely face card weather thingie they wouldn't be a spam spewing zombie right now. People need to take responsiblity for haveing insecure systems. It isn't Microsofts fault, I use XP and my system is secure, its their own fault for being lazy and ignorant. If they start getting billed for their ignorance than maybee they will pay more attention to computer secutity.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[Endo13]

Except that once you start taxing emails, it'll be just one more of those taxes they (whoever gets the revenue) depends on, and they'll keep pushing it up when they 'need' more cash flow. No thanks, I'd rather deal with spam.

And thanks to Yahoo's way of dealing with spam, I can see exactly what I'd be getting with no spam filtering at all.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[Comboman]

Okay, but I'm fairly sure they're not paying $.02 per email. The principle that would make this work is that there is a proportional cost for sending emails. That's when it stops making economic sense.

But the spammers could easily adapt to such a system (even assuming it could be successfully and securely implemented, which it can't). Spammers currently send spam to every email address they can get there hands on. They don't care if it is unused or invalid since there's no cost involved. If they were charged $0.02 per email, they would have to get smarter about their lists, using only known active addresses and maybe linking in demographic data (eg. only send v1agra ads to males over 50). Rather than eliminating spam, the email tax would likely just force spammers to be more efficent and possibly even more effective than they are now (at least on par with snailmail "direct marketing" businesses who seem to have no problem dealing with a per-mail cost that is much higher than $0.02).

Re:Only one cure for spam

[SillyNickName4me]

Okay, but I'm fairly sure they're not paying $.02 per email.

Probably, but it depends. Usually they pay people for the amount of time the computer is used, not for the number of mails.

The principle that would make this work is that there is a proportional cost for sending emails. That's when it stops making economic sense.

As both me and another poster already pointed out, it doesn't stop junk mail in your physical mailbox, despite the cost per mail being a bit more then $0.02 there, so I see no reason why it will put an end to spam.

Also, why should people who run for example a mailinglist be charged yet another time for what is often a public service?

If you make it expensive enough to actually do something about spam, it will be too expensive for normal use by many people as well.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[Phroggy]

Good becuase its there stupidity that cuased their pc to be compromised in the first place. If they had just kept their system up to date and not installed the smilely face card weather thingie they wouldn't be a spam spewing zombie right now. People need to take responsiblity for haveing insecure systems. It isn't Microsofts fault, I use XP and my system is secure, its their own fault for being lazy and ignorant. If they start getting billed for their ignorance than maybee they will pay more attention to computer secutity.

Average stupid people won't pay it; they'll spend hours on the phone complaining to some poor customer service agent instead, about how they've been charged for services they haven't used and accused of something they haven't done. Meanwhile, the spammers have already moved on to their next victim, so they don't care.

There is currently no technical measure that can be taken to stop spam at the source. Sure, you can try to put up obstacles, but I assure you, spammers will continue to find workarounds. The only real solution is for Congress to earmark funding for the FTC and FBI to find and prosecute spammers. It won't happen overnight, but if you start throwing experienced spammers in jail, all you'll be left with is the inexperienced spammers, who are easier to deal with.

Will this force spammers to move overseas? Absolutely, and many foreign governments have already agreed to cooperate in the war on spam.

Then there's the question of whether spam is actually illegal. Well, remember CAN-SPAM, the law that most Slashdotters said was a complete waste of time? The argument was, if CAN-SPAM were actually enforced, we'd still get a ton of legal spam that complies with the CAN-SPAM act. That's true, but it would be trivial to filter out! I almost never get spam that complies with CAN-SPAM.

Re:Only one cure for spam

[ocelotbob]

The difference is is that with airline travel, there's a definite answer where the money is going. You take off at point A and you land in point B. The airline merely acts as a collections agent for the various fees; they just distribute the tax moneys for you. Email makes it difficult, if not impossible to handle this situation, and in fact, the fact that email is multinational could make the spamming problem worse. Were some country, say Russia, to not allow the taxes to be collected, then suddenly, the entire system breaks down. Companies now only have to telnet to Russia to send mail without impunity, while legitimate users have to spend what could be significant amounts of money in order to send mail.

A small point

[BertieBaggio]

Following these Spamhaus stories, I see a lot of comments from the /. denizens along the lines of "Spamhaus provides a list which is optional to use, so what is the big deal?". I agree with this sentiment, however e360insight's angle was that Spamhaus was denying them business by calling them a spammer. Of course, this entailed adding them to a list which administrators used to curb unwanted emails getting through. That's my reading (IANAL etc etc); if I'm wrong, please correct me.

Unfortunately it seems like Spamhaus went about defending this incorrectly ("I don't recognize the authority of this court, take it to the Federal court", "Okay", "I don't recognize the authority of the Federal court..."), which has complicated matters. I'd have liked to see how this would have turned out had it A) been defended correctly or B) no authority besides the UK courts recognized in the first place. Still, I think this has a little way to run before we see the end of this.

Re:The solution is not SpamHouse, it's SPF !

[cortana]

I don't think so. SPF has serious technical problems:

http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/sm tp-spf-is-harmful.html

Not to mention the legal uncertainty surrounding the version hijacked by Microsoft.

Spamhaus have their problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the comments I've read so far seem to be in favour of Spamhaus, and while I agree that they do some good work, they are not all good. Specifically, they seem over keen to blacklist address ranges without providing any proof, and very reluctant to unblock these.

I work for an ISP providing dedicated server hosting & colocation. Recently a couple of our customers contacted us saying that they had appeared on the Spamhaus blacklist, and were consequently having trouble sending e-mails. They claimed that they had not involved in any spamming activities, and that this listing was therefore incorrect. We found out that Spamhaus had blacklisted a range of our IP addresses (specifically a /27 subnet), and their explanation was that we were hosting someone from their ROKSO list.

While it was indeed true that we were hosting a server for this person, Spamhaus had a) blocked an address range larger than the IP addresses involved with this spammer, and b) would not offer any proof that the spammer had been using the server we host for him to involve in any spamming activities. When we contacted them, they refused to unblock this range unless we suspended the account of this spammer (again without providing any proof of activities conducted from our network that would breach our TOS), even though they acknowledged that the range they were blocking involved innocent customers. For us to suspend him at the request of Spamhaus would have been US breaking our contract with him, as there was no indication that he had violated our AUP (which DOES prohibit involvement with spam).

When we refused to break our contract with our customer at the request of a third party (perfectly acceptable position imho!), Spamhaus said that if they blocked any of our customers in future, they would blacklist our entire network (which is a considerable amount of addresses). This is unacceptable in my view, they are essentially trying to hold us to ransom without providing any proof of activities. When talking with some other ISPs, we heard of similar stories. In one case, the ISP concerned suspended the spammer's account and contacted Spamhaus to have their blacklist removed, and were told that "due to under-staffing, Spamhaus would not be able to remove the blacklist entry for a couple of days. however, if they would like to make a donation to spamhaus, they would remove the entry much sooner".

To reiterate my earlier point, Spamhaus does provide a valuable service, there's not much doubt of this. But they way in which they are organised leaves a lot to be desired!

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Anonymous Coward]

"In one case, the ISP concerned suspended the spammer's account and contacted Spamhaus to have their blacklist removed, and were told that "due to under-staffing, Spamhaus would not be able to remove the blacklist entry for a couple of days. however, if they would like to make a donation to spamhaus, they would remove the entry much sooner"."

Could you offer proof of this, or a reference contact who would happen to have the communication still lying around? Just curious.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[RAMMS EIN]

``When we refused to break our contract with our customer at the request of a third party (perfectly acceptable position imho!)''

Well, anything at all could have been in that contract. While I agree that you have no obligation to break your contract just because someone wants you to, similarly, I think Spamhaus has no obligation to remove you from their list just because you want them to (whatever the list is, and whatever its stated purpose).

What you can do is make a lot of noise about Spamhaus claiming to blacklist spammers, but actually blacklisting a lot of legitimate addresses as well. It probably runs against the interests of would-be Spamhaus customers if Spmahaus's lists contain a lot of false positives, so this would make Spamhaus's service less attractive - and offer opportunities for competitors. Eventually, I believe, this system will regulate itself.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[SillyNickName4me]

While it was indeed true that we were hosting a server for this person, Spamhaus had a) blocked an address range larger than the IP addresses involved with this spammer, and b) would not offer any proof that the spammer had been using the server we host for him to involve in any spamming activities.

1. It is extremely difficult to make it onto the ROKSO list. It requires multiple incidents, and Spamhous is not unclear at all about what it takes to get on there.
2. By allowing people on the ROKSO list to rent a server from you, you are helping them running their business, regardless of if that actual server is used for spamming or not. Spamhouse is of the opinion that if you make money by helping such people, that you deserve action being taken against you, and that indeed includes blocking more then the specific server, at least after a while.
3. Having a range blocked is the consequence of escalation. It is usually not the initial action they take when you end up doing hosting for someone involved in spamming

When we contacted them, they refused to unblock this range unless we suspended the account of this spammer (again without providing any proof of activities conducted from our network that would breach our TOS), even though they acknowledged that the range they were blocking involved innocent customers. For us to suspend him at the request of Spamhaus would have been US breaking our contract with him, as there was no indication that he had violated our AUP (which DOES prohibit involvement with spam).

Again, you don't get onto ROKSO for no reason. spamhous documents their ROKSO entries quite well usually, so 'involvement in spam' is quite likely here, and you can quite review why a certain person ended up on that list.

And yes, I have worked for an ISP in the same position as you are in. The choice we had was between:

1. Review the documentation and decide that the price for breaking the contract was much lower then the price for supporting spam
2. Don't do anything untill they escalate (effectively just delaying the issue)
3. Don't do anything at all

Both financial and moral obligations made the first option the best by far, and getting of the list was quite easy after this.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[OneSmartFellow]

Hey, guess what?
Spamhouse does not, and cannot, filter your outgoing mail, or the outgoing mail from any of the spammers you sell accounts to.

Spamhouse allows Me to filter that stuff. Hell, they don't even provide me an application to do it. They simply provide categorised lists. It's data. I choose to use that data, and you can't stop me from using that data.

They are providing a service to me, not denying a service to you or your spammer buddies.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[rar]

And yes, I have worked for an ISP in the same position as you are in. The choice we had was between:
      1. Review the documentation and decide that the price for breaking the contract was much lower then the price for supporting spam
      2. Don't do anything untill they escalate (effectively just delaying the issue)
      3. Don't do anything at all


How about putting into your contract with your customers that engaging in activities that gets them onto well known public email blacklists are defined as spamming, and if they do so, they will have to resolve the issue with the blacklist, or are otherwise in violation of the 'no-spaming' clause of the contract?

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[SillyNickName4me]

How about putting into your contract with your customers that engaging in activities that gets them onto well known public email blacklists are defined as spamming, and if they do so, they will have to resolve the issue with the blacklist, or are otherwise in violation of the 'no-spaming' clause of the contract?

That would work if it wasn't for some well known blacklists being inacurate and impossible to deal with. Listing the ones which are 'reliable' will not work either because that changes more often then I am willing to change contracts with customers.

If it is a $10/month customer I'm sure that in virtually all cases breaking the contract is cheaper then dealing with the mess. For customers who pay a lot more then that, it really pays to do a bit of background research into that customer before accepting them.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I work for an ISP providing dedicated server hosting & colocation. Recently a couple of our customers contacted us saying that they had appeared on the Spamhaus blacklist, and were consequently having trouble sending e-mails. They claimed that they had not involved in any spamming activities, and that this listing was therefore incorrect. We found out that Spamhaus had blacklisted a range of our IP addresses (specifically a /27 subnet), and their explanation was that we were hosting someone from their ROKSO list.

Buddy, believe me, as a long time victim of spam when I say; Fuck You, and Fuck Your Customers. Your story is an example of Spamhaus doing its job, and doing it right. If your ISP loses customers and goes under, it'll be one less spammer firendly host. I say, good riddance.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[topham]

You are of course aware that several companies and individuals have been placed on those lists for extremely arbitrary reasons, right?

Nothing but thugs.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[hb253]

Corporate email admin anecdote:

I work for a legitimate, non-spamming multinational company with presence in the US, UK, Canada, South America, Asia, etc etc). From my experience, Spamhaus definitely works like a self-righteous vigilante organization. My company's mail servers were blacklisted several times earlier this year simply because employees' out-of-office autoreply rules were autoreplying to spam messages (the few that get through our filters). I assume our servers were blacklisted either because messages hit a spamtrap or some clueless person complained about getting junk mail from my company.

They told us we should stop people from using auto-reply rules. Right. For 35,000 people where client communication is paramount. Brilliant vigilante thinking.

The end result was months of legal wrangling. Threats of a lawsuit finally brought them into line.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[davros-too]

I have a great deal of sympathy with Spamhaus aims and many of their methods, but blacklisting IP ranges as opposed to the actual IPs of known or suspected spammers is actually evil. To me this is equivalent to them sending around some thugs with crowbars to say 'they're real nice servers you got there... it would be a real pity if something happened to those servers... say a little crowbar accident...' Its intimidation pure and simple.

OK I acknowledge that the spammers - quite probably the one running the server mentioned above - are in many ways behaving in even *worse* ways than this. But I really don't like the vigilante approach. I think it brings the anti-spam movement down to the same moral level as the spammers and that in the long run this will be counter-productive.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Chagrin]

I've had my Spamhaus problems too. Kept finding my smart host listed on the CBL -- I could remove it manually, but mainly I focused my time on figuring out what the heck was causing the block. Spent *a lot* of time looking at messages for spam.

At the time the CBL specifically ignored any messages sent to them and gave no contact address. When I finally found one, I received a reply and was told that, because my reverse DNS for my smart host looked "suspicious" I was being blocked. We're not talking about a fake RDNS or anything -- it was perfectly legitimate. The problem was I had the IP address embedded in the name. That's enough for the CBL to block you.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[catman]

Well - I work for a company with ~70,000 mail addresses.
Any employee who was stupid enough to set up autoreplies like that
would be reprimanded and told to 1). read the manual, 2) if you still dont'
understand it, ask for assistance.

PEBKAC.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[hb253]

Enlighten me. What is the proper way to set up an autoreply?

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Dimensio]

You are of course aware that several companies and individuals have been placed on those lists for extremely arbitrary reasons, right?

Please provide evidence to support this claim.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Todd Knarr]

That's the way it's supposed to work. It's a matter of leverage.

Suppose I'm receiving spam from the spammer who's buying service from you. I complain to you and ask you to take down the web site he's using to peddle his wares. What reason do you have to do anything about him? He's paying you, I'm not. As long as only his servers are blacklisted, he's going to remain in business.

Now, Spamhaus comes along and blacklists the netblock he's in. A lot of your legitimate customers now find themselves unable to send mail. They start to complain to you. Now you're facing a business decision: do you drop the one spammer, or do you watch many of your customers leave for other ISPs that don't host spammers? Action's much more likely when the people complaining are actually your paying customers.

And yes, we tried being selective. We tried for years. It didn't work. It didn't get your attention. Netblock-wide blacklisting is getting your attention.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Phroggy]

Yeah right, if you're running an ISP, you're doing it all wrong if you don't reserve the right to monitor all traffic coming and going on your connection. I bet you yourself are the one doing the spamming.....

They probably did monitor, and couldn't find any evidence of spamming themselves. The customer is a known spammer, but the customer was not using this ISP's service to engage in spam, at least as far as the ISP can tell. Spamhaus may have evidence to the contrary, but they're not sharing. The ISP has a contract with the customer (whom they didn't know was a spammer when they entered into the contract), and the customer has not violated the terms of that contract as far as the ISP knows. The ISP doesn't want to break the contract just because Spamhaus says they should, and Spamhaus's attitude frankly sucks.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[catman]

No completely safe way, but setting it to reply only to senders in your address book is a first step.
Myself, I'd set it to reply only to senders inside the company (i.e. same domain name as my own address).
Or, don't use an autoreply at all, but forward incoming mail to someone who can handle it in your absence.

An undiscriminate autoreplier is anathema to every mailing list operator ...

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[SillyNickName4me]

Almost all ISPs I've had had some clause allowing them to cancel service at their sole discretion (and it didn't even rely on you being a spammer or anything). My advice would be to get a lawyer familiar with such matters to draft better contracts than whatever you're using :) Sounds like you don't have a lawyer familiar with your business if you're having to go around breaking contracts with people. Good contracts are supposed to spell out exactly what happens in any forseeable circumstance, so that you don't end up suing each other over it.

And maybe I live in a place where there are much stricter limits on which clauses of such contracts will be upheld by courts, esp. when it happens to be with a 'consumer'. Generally contracts do contain such a clause, but also generally that clause is declared invalid by courts when it comes to it, at least where I live. This may be different of course in places that lack such consumer protection for example...

When looking at large business as customer, I dare you to find one that will accept an 'at our sole discretion' clause in such a contract.

So.. before jumping to a conclusion again, maybe also think for a bit...

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Kazoo the Clown]

Now, Spamhaus comes along and blacklists the netblock he's in. A lot of your legitimate customers now find themselves unable to send mail. They start to complain to you. Now you're facing a business decision: do you drop the one spammer, or do you watch many of your customers leave for other ISPs that don't host spammers? Action's much more likely when the people complaining are actually your paying customers.

By doing this, Spamhaus is trading one problem for another-- trading spam off against the reliability of legitimate email. This makes them significantly part of the problem, not the solution. They translate a problem the solution of which they derive a revenue stream from, into a different problem which has no effect on their revenue stream.

A more extreme version of this technique would be to shut down the entire internet everytime anyone sent a spam message on the theory that eventually the spammers will quit because they derive no benefit from an otherwise nonexistent internet. What you are describing only differs in degree, but it essentially the same disfunctional approach to the problem.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[LazloHollyfeld]

And of course this posting is anonymous. They're always anonymous.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[efalk]

By spamhaus? I'm aware of no such incidents. Perhaps you'd like to give specifics.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure that is really insightfull. Let's use a nuke instead of a bullet to shut down the spammer? WTF? And then lets not back it up with any facts that they did anything wrong. oh, one murder in the city, lets' nuke them all. Really smart.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Todd Knarr]

Exactly. Spamhaus makes the spammers the ISP's direct problem. Without blocking, or with very selective blocking, the spammers aren't the ISP's problem at all. The only people who complain about them can't financially affect the ISP, so why should the ISP act against a paying customer? With netblock-level blocking, it moves the effect of the spammer onto people who are paying customers of the ISP. When they start complaining, the ISP takes action.

Spamhaus is only part of the problem for people who want to benefit financially from spammers without suffering any financial consequences for doing so.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[topham]

Last time I did that the individuals involved were put on more lists. No thanks.

The rabid anti-spam people can go play with themselves.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[ajv]

(Mods: My last comment on Spamhaus was sent to "troll" land - my first ever negative comment on Slashdot in 10 years. Being pro-Spamhaus != good netcitizen and vice-versa. I am a good netcitizen, working extensively on Australian internet governance issues, such as being the technical dude who worked on auDA when we moved from monopoly to a regulated DNS environment, and secured Australia's second largest ISP and helped build and secure the alternative massive backbone, which carries all academic traffic as well as most ISP traffic. I was once the SAGE-AU President, and I still abide by their code of ethics. Therefore, if you mark me a troll or flamebait, you are a working against the best interests of the Internet. Read and decide for yourselves, but be v. careful when you hit the moderation button.)

This is happening to me right now. Spamhaus are acting like a wild west sheriff, but have no responsibility.

I host a number of websites, one of which has 5500 car nuts. I suffer *actual* financial loss directly because of Spamhaus' illegal blocking of my hoster's entire netblock. The spammer is gone, and yet we are still blacklisted. There is no way to get off this virtual death penalty.

New folks wanting to talk about VWs on my forum can't, and they leave, frustrated. I don't even know that they're stuck as my mail from the system is broken. Those few I do hear about - via the users being very persistent, cause me to spend 10-15 minutes per new registrant to get them on. If they lose their password, I can't help them. I spend an extra hour or two every night working on problems, and although I get a nice Google check once a quarter which generally comes close to paying the hoster, I'm suffering growth problems now - we moved from 2500 to 4000 members in no time, but our last 1500 members have dribbled in over the last 18 months. In the 18 months I've known about this problem, Spamhaus have cost me at least $4500 in lost wages at McDonald's rate (far lower than my actual hourly rate), and at least (and this is EXTREMELY conservative) $1500 in lost advertising revenue. I run my site out of a love for Volkswagens and as close to being a non-profit as I can whilst allowing for growth (we will eventually need more servers), but it's still coming out of my pocket. The loss to me is significant in time and money, but the loss of community is immense. Spamhaus are destroying my community, and many thousands of others with their negligence.

Spamhaus must:

* Provide a way to get unaffected netblocks off their list. This "block the lot" collateral damage is like mowing down an entire kindergarten of kids to get at the pedo jerking off at the fence.

* Acknowledge the financial harm they cause when they block domains that have NOTHING to do with spam. Even the spammer who used the netblock (before being kicked off) used it for pr0n, not spam. Netblocking the entire 64 odd class C's (in my hoster's case), blocking thousands of innocent customers just because one of them hosted pr0n for a short while before moving on did not in ANY way reduce the world's spam problem. I'm certain we are not the only site suffering this.

Totally unacceptable.

Do NOT mark me down as a troll - Spamhaus are not the protectors you think they are. I once thought they were, but they are not our friends, merely falliable people who see everything as black and white. I do not want them working for us any more. They must be put out of their misery. Hopefully, a replacement RBL will arise who aren't so arrogant, take some responsibility, carve out netblocks and /32s which make sense, and preferably be in the form of actual law enforcement. Spam is illegal in most countries, and citizens MUST not and indeed are NOT allowed to take the law into their own hands. Spamhaus are not the solution, and never have been.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Copid]

A more extreme version of this technique would be to shut down the entire internet everytime anyone sent a spam message on the theory that eventually the spammers will quit because they derive no benefit from an otherwise nonexistent internet. What you are describing only differs in degree, but it essentially the same disfunctional approach to the problem.

How is that a meaningful argument at all? Burning jaywalkers at the steak differs from ticketing them only in degree, but that doesn't mean that ticketing them is a disfunctional approach to the problem. The more important question is, is the degree of difference meaningful? There is a meaningful difference between bringing the Internet to a halt and blocking email from an IP range.

Anyway, how is this different from organized boycotting of companies whose business practices you want to change? I won't buy your tuna because you're killing dolphins when you fish. You want to sell me tuna, and I want to eat tuna, so it hurts both of us, but does that make it a disfunctional solution if it works?

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Kazoo the Clown]

The problem here is the cure is worse than the disease. It undermines the reliability of EVERYONE's email, including many innocent parties, in a pathetic, impotent, would-be-Fascist attempt to "educate" ISPs. It is an attempt to make SPAM the ISPs problem-- when it is in fact the SPAMMER who is responsible yet is relatively unaffected by this "solution". Just because all ISPs don't agree with you about the right way to deal with the problem doesn't make them rogues, and attempts to enforce the "right" solution on them makes Spamhaus far worse than the spammers in my book. Frankly, blocking their domain name is just the dose of their own medicine they deserve. Spamhaus has simply opportunistically sold some folks a bill of goods-- that their RBL technique will actually fix the spam problem. Well, it won't. It doesn't really even mitigate it-- instead merely tranforming the spam problem into a couple of differentr problems. It is snake-oil, plain and simple.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[ronabop]

Most of the comments I've read so far seem to be in favour of Spamhaus, and while I agree that they do some good work, they are not all good. Specifically, they seem over keen to blacklist address ranges without providing any proof, and very reluctant to unblock these.

You have it backwards. They have no reason, no burden of proof, to pick apart your network to discover which parts of your network you are allowing to systematically abuse the internet.

I work for an ISP providing dedicated server hosting & colocation. Recently a couple of our customers contacted us saying that they had appeared on the Spamhaus blacklist, and were consequently having trouble sending e-mails. They claimed that they had not involved in any spamming activities, and that this listing was therefore incorrect. We found out that Spamhaus had blacklisted a range of our IP addresses (specifically a /27 subnet), and their explanation was that we were hosting someone from their ROKSO list.

Exactly as it should be. If you are allowing sexual predators to use your apartment complex in some way to victimize children, don't be surprised when the neighborhood shuns the nuns living in the same complex.

While it was indeed true that we were hosting a server for this person, Spamhaus had a) blocked an address range larger than the IP addresses involved with this spammer, and b) would not offer any proof that the spammer had been using the server we host for him to involve in any spamming activities.

Lovely, so, as long as he was only using your apartment complex to molest children elsewhere, that's just dandy by you?

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Vadim Makarov]

Sonds to me like this is the right type of action against you. It should be painfully non-profitable to host spammers.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[Jboy_24]

Except you have forgotten a crucial piece of his story. The ISP asked for evidence of spam, he got none. The IPS's TOS specify that sending of spam will violate them, so he can cancel the account if he gets evidence. From what I understand, Spamhaus will not send any, besides saying that the person with the account is on their BlackList. Which I take as a tad too extreme, once a spammer, you can never not be a spammer? And you'll hunt down every account the spammer has and block that ISP's IP blocks?

Anyhow, the whole thread seems to be about spamhaus and their legal problems, from what I have read, it really seems Spamhaus is trying these 'escalation' practises you mention on the US Legal system. "Oh so we fucked up in court, and our domain may be taken away, so we're going to martyr ourselves". The point being, SpamHaus fucked up, and continue to fuck up in their handling of the court case. Why they didn't try for an imeddiate dismissal and repayment of lawyer fees, plus a countersuit is beyond me.

Anyhow, let this be a lesson to all of us, don't tell a court to fuck off till after they rule in your favor.

Re:Spamhaus have their problems

[dodobh]

Which company? I am seriously considering blocking blowback (including Out of Office replies) at work.

Re:I work for a company...

[KDR_11k]

I guess the problem comes from the products not being stand-alone and not being easily interchangeable. All cars serve the same purpose and you could attach a trailer to any car strong enough to pull it. With software the interchangeability is lost, you can't trivially (i.e. without many hours of setting up) replace Windows with another OS and still run the same applications. If there were like 20 different OSes and they could all run the same applications (e.g. if all OSes were Linuxes with different Kernels and stuff but the same APIs) there wouldn't be a monoculture but software has a reinforcement cycle, the software that's popular gets more stuff made for it and thus becomes preferrable over the alternatives.

Spamhaus should have defended the lawsuit

[PingXao]

I like Spamhaus. Hell, I USE it daily. It was a bad move to ignore the lawsuit. I understand why they ignored it, but I think it was a foolish decision in the long run.

SPAM is a serious problem

[atarione]

please forward this slashdot story to 20 of your friends in order to fight spam.... actually just to be sure email it to them twice.

How can having IPv6 make it worse?

[dido]

No one will be hiding behind NAT's or using dynamic IP's with IPv6. These two abuses of IPv4 addressing are the main reason why it is so difficult these days to track down and control sources of network abuse, including spam. This will make it easier to make computers and people responsible for them accountable for their actions, which means spammers and people who insist on running insecure operating systems can no longer hide or deny responsibility so easily as they can now.

The Day Without Immigrants was a plea for help

[m0llusk]

After the failed attempt of the illegal alien crowd to shut down the USA by telling immigrants to march on one day (they don't differentiate between illegal and legal), ...

This is garbage and as such damages any argument you might try to make regarding the subject being discussed (spam). The goal of the Day Without Immigrants protest was to call attention to both the plight and the influence of immigrants. Apparently you are uptight about being part of a system that explicitly relies on undocumented immigrant labor? Perhaps a bright future awaits you in the agricultural or travel industries? There was no attempt to shut down the US, and during the protests it was common to see expressions of patriotism including displays of the flag and replicas of the Statue of Liberty.

Absolutely everyone differentiates between illegal and legal. That is the whole point. In order to become a legal immigrant there should be a process. The existing process typically takes in excess of ten years simply to review an application, never mind actually approving one and letting someone in. Many of these people who wait for ten years or typically more may do quite a bit of productive work in the interim. While the rules for entrance get endless argument Americans show they want immigrants by hiring them and endorsing the products that are associated with them by forking over money.

Perhaps you might be able to kick start your empathy if you moved away from the focus on illegality and thought more about the criteria involved. If someone is willing to work hard and has skills that are valued, does a waiting period of at least ten years make sense as an initial barrier before other barriers are introduced? Hint: There would be fewer undocumented workers if the process for documenting them functioned at all, even functioned as designed, better yet functioned by more common criteria.

Re:The Day Without Immigrants was a plea for help

[swb]

Immigration systems will always suck. You can't have purely open immigration -- no sane person advocates that anyone who want to live and work in the US should be able to.

Therefore, there will ALWAYS be limits to immigration and a bureaucracy to manage those limits. I'm sure we could do what we do now more efficiently, but in the end you'll end up about where we are now.

oh rly?

[Rulke]

I know people are going to love this... but after much thought I really only know one solid way to get rid of spam. That is by changing the system so spamming doesn't make any economic sense. Yes, what we need is a $0.2 tax on each email sent. As soon as bulk emailing has cost/benefit implications, spam is gone. Then, marketing has to work. The tax money could also be used for something good, like infrastructure development and upkeep.

Yeah, spam would die, as would all the will known and respected mailinglists with hundreds of thousands of users.

Re:The solution is not SpamHouse, it's SPF !

[Anonymous Coward]

> SPF has serious technical problems:

SMTP has serious technical problems, it wasn't designed to be deployed on a hostile network.

> Not to mention the legal uncertainty surrounding the version hijacked by Microsoft.

???

There is no legal uncertainty. Microsoft SenderID has nothing to do with SPF other than checking SPF records created for a SMTP transaction against a message body. Sender ID has zero technical merit, it was a Microsoft attempt to muddy the waters, and the IETF was complicit.

Re: Okay... Postage... But?

[gbulmash]

Who collects the postage? Who does it go to? Are they obligated to use it for something constructive, or would the penny-per-e-mail just fatten the bottom line of AOL and Nerflink?

All we need to do is two things:

1: Link spamming to terrorism. Convince people that when they do business with spammers, they're funding global terrorism.

2: If Bush can put a "wanted dead or alive" price on the heads of top terrorists, then we can have a spam czar using the penny per e-mail tax to put a price on the heads of top spammers.

Suuuure, it's worked so well to get Americans to give up their SUVs and take public transit to slow the flow of all the oil money that supports terrorists. And those bounties have helped us get Osama Bin Laden in custody. Right?

Re:SpamHaus users can use n.n.n.n form URLs

[somersault]

The message was sent at 8.20am (GMT at least), I'm guessing he hadn't had his coffee yet ;)

Re:I work for a company...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone has the privilege of setting their own budget.

To worries over Spamhaus outages, from what I heard, they maintain a regularly updated list that people retrieve from them. Power outages wouldn't be a problem, shutting down however would make the list gradually less relevant. In practice it would have to be dropped fairly quickly though, for the sake of those who have plugged security holes but can't be removed.

An even easier solution

[Ogemaniac]

Just have a "cut me off after $5/month" plan. Few use 500 emails per month. For those that do, there could be 10/15/20/etc plans.

Re:An even easier solution

[RAMMS EIN]

Yes, good idea. You could even have the system remind you that you're approaching or have exceeded your quota, and require you to extend your quota if you want to send more messages.

(Hmm. I keep running into the "Slow Down Cowboy!" message. Perhaps my new keyboard configuration is a bit _too_ effective...)

Re:An even easier solution

[rar]

Just have a "cut me off after $5/month" plan. Few use 500 emails per month.

Right; I don't debate that this is another solution that makes it harder for spammers to operate. I'm just saying that the spammers will adapt and make more use of the huge number of online identities they have accumulated. Basically, as long as they control a victims computer they can at least always do as much harm as that individual user could do himself;

• 500 email per month on millions of hacked computers still allows for a lot of spam.
  
• The victim likely has email through some other means than his ISP. 500 emails at hotmail? Spam! Does he connect via VLAN to work? SPAM!
  
• The victim likely has an IM service to freely communicate with his closests friends. SPAM THOSE SUCKERS!
  
• Does the victim use one of the biggest ISPs? Lets send in an reqest for an upgraded email plan for him!
  
• Can his credit cards be snooped? Lets sign him up for a 3:d party email service [1].
  

etc, etc...

[1] If the attacker has a credit card number, why not just steal the victims money? Normal CC fraud can be traced, but to order a service for the victims own computer from the same computer should be nearly impossible to trace to someone else...

Re:An even easier solution

[nuzak]

> 500 email per month on millions of hacked computers still allows for a lot of spam.

Actually, given the deliverability rates of spam, it would pretty much eliminate it. No one is going to want to pay it though.

And I think this bears lots of repeating: If an ISP actually cared about their outbound spam, they would already be doing something about the problem in the first place.

Case in point: How much spam do you see from AOL these days? (and no, CD's don't count)

Datafeed

[HuskyDog]

Surely, only small users make use of Spamhaus via DNS? I always assumed that big ISPs and corporate customers will use their Datafeed service. If spamhaus.org goes offline, then surely all that would happen is that users' databases would stop being updated. I agree that this would cause an increase in spam, but only slowly as the data aged, not in one sudden spludge as would happen to those using the DNS service?

Re:It could be worse

[hey!]

Oh wait it couldn't... Looks like it's time to start clustering my servers...

I read the above as "Looks like it's time to start clustering my sewers..."

Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[carpeweb]

More than 90% of of all email is now spam
Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable

I think the math is a lot more complicated than this implies. Here's how I'd work it:

• P = % Spam (% of all sent mail)
• S(T) = Total Mail Sent
• S(S) = Spam Sent
• S(N) = Non-Spam Sent
• E(T) = Overall Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
• E(S) = Spamhaus Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus Only)
• E(O) = Other Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
• F(T) = Overall Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
• F(S) = Spamhaus Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus Only)
• F(O) = Other Type II Error Rate (% false positive, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
• R(T) = Total Mail Received
• R(S) = Spam Received
• R(N) = Non-Spam Received

We're interested in R(T) and what happens to it with and without Spamhaus. (Assuming we're still interested at all, since math sometimes does that ...).

With Spamhaus:

• R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
• R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(T)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(T)]
• R(T) = P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)]

Without Spamhaus:

• R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
• R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(O)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(O)]
• R(T) = P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)]

The difference, expressed as a ratio of (Without Spamhaus - With Spamhaus)/(With Spamhaus), is

[ P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)] ] - [ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]

Divided By

[ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]

The assumptions yielding either the ten-fold or the four-fold increase seem to be that E(O)=0, and of course that false positives don't matter. Even with these assumptions, the math in the OP is a bit fuzzy to me:

• E(O) = 0
• E(T) = E(S)
• F(O) = 0
• F(T) = 0 [i.e., F(S) = 0 as well]
  yields (reducing above ratio):
• [ P x S(T) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] - [ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
  
  Divided By
  
  [ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
• Which Reduces To:
  
  P x E(T) / [ 1 - [ P x E(T) ] ]

The ten-fold increase seems to be predicated upon both P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=1. However, even if that were true, the increase would actually be nine-fold (.9/.1).

The four-fold increase seems to be predicated upon P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=.75. However, this would yield about a two-fold increase of

[.9 x .75] / [ 1 - (.9 x .75) ] = 27/13 = 2.08 (approx.)

Factoring in false positives might actually make the Without Spamhaus scenario more dire, but clearly it would be less dire if we assume that E(O) is not zero. A better approximation would use the marginal efficiency of Spamhaus. Even with a generous assumption that Spamhaus catches an additional third of all spams sent (vs. all others without Spamhaus, and ignoring false positives), the overall increase in R(T) looks less than 50% to me (.3/.7, or approximately 43%).

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Interseting, here's some math that will benefit your employer:

• D = The working day
  
• W = Time spent working
  
• S = Time spent on slashdot
  

Your employer is interested in the time you spend working, hence:

D - S = W

Now you need only calculate the ratio of work to slashdot and drop the results with finance and HR.

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[Ibn al-Hazardous]

There are important problems with your calculation too. The question you do not ask is: Do the other filters help at connection time. With an IP blacklist - you don't have to recieve calls at the relay level at all. This keeps the IP-traffic down.

So, if there are no other IP-blacklists used at the mail server level, the IP-traffic used by mail may rise by one order of magintude. Considering that a lot of spam includes big fat images of the text (to defeat local spam filters), the IP-traffic may rise a bit more than that.

What ends up in the users mailbox is only one aspect of this problem, and not the biggest one (which your calculation shows quite nicely).

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[carpeweb]

Ahhh ... if only I had an employer. Alas, the implicit math for me was very similar, however (and maybe implicit in my post time):

• N = The peaceful night
• Z = Time spent sleeping
• S = Time spent on /.

Replacing the inoperative variables in your equation yields:

N - S = Z

In this particular case, Z didn't seem to be happening, so in fact it was forcing the S, not the other way around. Maybe Z will be more of a constraint tonight.

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[carpeweb]

I wasn't knowledgeable enough to ask about the specifics of connection time. It would make the algebra even uglier, though, right?

if there are no other IP-blacklists used at the mail server level, the IP-traffic used by mail may rise by one order of magintude

Isn't that sort of what my calculation showed (increase factor of 2.08, not looking back at my OP)? If you changed all the variables in my algebra to focus only on receiving calls at the relay level and made all the same assumptions about the effectiveness of Spamhaus filtering, it seems like you'd have the same equation for the first-order traffic effect. But then you'd have to account for the relay effects (typical message goes from A to B to C to D ... and at what point does Spamhaus cut it off?). I'm obviously out of my depth, just musing but curious. AFAIK, a single message typical doesn't take multiple paths, so at least there's no exponential effect to worry about, but it still seems like it's important to know how many nodes/relays are involved and how early in the hopping the filter takes effect.

I'm sure I'm still being too simplistic, but these additional considerations reinforce one or both of the two reasons I posted:

• The math is uglier than the ten-fold or four-fold arguments implied
• The increase is significantly less than either of those arguments implied

I never meant to imply that an increase even of say, 50%, was not significant. A 50% increase in IP traffic sounds to me like it could be a doomsday scenario at least in the short run.

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[bidule]

The ten-fold increase seems to be predicated upon both P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=1. However, even if that were true, the increase would actually be nine-fold (.9/.1).

Try with P = .91 and come back when you get the answer. So many lines of equations and you can't solve a simple fraction? You must be an engineer, no?

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[Blakey Rat]

I have a cold and phoned in sick to work. What's your excuse?

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[carpeweb]

Touche!

But, if I were an engineer, wouldn't I still be working on the next digit of the long division? (OK, only if I were an old school engineer?)

Re:Questioning the Math/Assumptions

[jroysdon]

See my other post with real-world numbers for the past 24 hours. While I'm not a math major and don't plan to work through the forumlas, my numbers seem to back up what the parent here is saying. Basically 20-25% of my spam would make it through if Spamhaus wasn't there, as SpamCop would catch the other 75-80%. I can say this is true as I can filter the mail through SpamCop first and then Spamhaus and see the nubmers reverse themselves. Most likely after that, SpamAssassin using SURBL, DCC, and Pyzor would catch the rest (I'm not willing to let the mail into my MTA to test) anyway, but just at a much higher CPU cost.

National Security Issue?

[Purity Of Essence]

What happens when government email servers start crashing? Will this become a "national security" issue? Will it occur to government that the CAN-SPAM Act was a horrible bit of legislation? Or will they see the server crashes as an attack on infrastructure? And what is the likely result? Government putting legal pressure on software makers to patch their security holes? Or owners of zombified computers being placed under NSA scrutiny?

Re:National Security Issue?

[Phroggy]

What happens when government email servers start crashing? Will this become a "national security" issue? Will it occur to government that the CAN-SPAM Act was a horrible bit of legislation? Or will they see the server crashes as an attack on infrastructure? And what is the likely result? Government putting legal pressure on software makers to patch their security holes? Or owners of zombified computers being placed under NSA scrutiny?

CAN-SPAM wasn't a horrible bit of legislation; in fact, it makes just about all the spam I currently receive clearly illegal. Just making it illegal doesn't solve the problem.

Windows XP Service Pack 2, released over two years ago, enables a firewall by default, which stops all those worms we used to be plagued with. Additionally, with the increasing popularity of 802.11 wifi, many people are moving their computers behind NAT routers, which also prevent those worms from working. Boy, that sure made a big dent in the amount of spam I see!

Seriously, security holes in software are not the problem. Sure, they make it a little easier to automate the process, but if Linux had over 50% market share on the desktop, millions of Linux boxes would be turned into spam zombies very quickly. My own Linux server was hit by a worm that turned it into a spam zombie for awhile; I didn't notice until I got a complaint from my ISP.

Re:National Security Issue?

[Purity Of Essence]

Hmmm, so what you're saying is the problem isn't actually security, it's people like you?

CAN-SPAM wasn't a horrible bit of legislation; in fact, it makes just about all the spam I currently receive clearly illegal.
The appropriately named CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was marketed as a tool to reduce spam. Does it do that? No, it does the opposite by legitimizing spam through a "first one's free" loophole that was probably put in there by powerful lobbyists. It does nothing to make unsolicited commercial email illegal. CAN-SPAN actually makes getting rid of spam utterly impossible. And that's your idea of good legislation?

Re:National Security Issue?

[Phroggy]

Hmmm, so what you're saying is the problem isn't actually security, it's people like you?

Yeah, basically. I made a stupid mistake (I created a temporary account for something, set a weak password, and forgot to delete the account when I was done). My point was that Linux is exploitable, and the majority of the population is more clueless than we are; if they were running Linux, malware would target them too.

The appropriately named CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was marketed as a tool to reduce spam. Does it do that? No, it does the opposite by legitimizing spam through a "first one's free" loophole that was probably put in there by powerful lobbyists.

And yet, I rarely see any of this newly-legitimized spam.

It does nothing to make unsolicited commercial email illegal. CAN-SPAN actually makes getting rid of spam utterly impossible. And that's your idea of good legislation?

OK, it's not good legislation, but it's not as bad as it could have been. It has loopholes, but spam that exploits those loopholes isn't currently bothering me. Spam that is illegal according to CAN-SPAM is what's causing most of the problems. If we could step up enforcement, illegal spam would decrease, and if this leaves only legalized spam remaining, taking care of that is as simple as changing the law.

Not a valid defense...

[kula.shinoda]

It is _not_ a valid defense to say that something would break without you - while you might be right, that is the wrong argument to be pushing here.

Would slashdot give Microsoft so much slack if they were put on trial for monopolistic behaviour, and said the world's computers would become vulnerable if they were put out of business?

Re:Not a valid defense...

[rolfc]

"the world's computers would become vulnerable"

They already are vulnerable, and they would probably be less vulnerable if Microsoft went out of business.

Ghostbusters

[ginotech]

This reminds me of a certain scene from ghostbusters. Hope it doesn't turn out exactly the same though..

Re:It could be worse

[geminidomino]

If Spamhaus goes down, then the difference will be semantic once the crapflood hits.

Spam vs Spam

[garlicbready]

I often thought wouldn't the best way to fight spam be via spam? i.e. grab all mail addresses from the spam mail and subscribe them to every mailing list on the planet using something like avalanche, it wouldn't stop them from sending, but at least they'd end up with no useable replies

Re:Spam vs Spam

[Heddahenrik]

Do that and I'll make sure your Internet-access is cut and that you get blacklisted as SPAM-terrorist, because you're so stupid that you think that the email-addresses in the SPAM have to do with the SPAM.

It's quite common to have fake email-addresses and fake URLs in the SPAM. Generally because it makes it harder to suspect the right person or because the SPAM is actually made to attack someone.

Re:Spam vs Spam

[mcvos]

I often thought wouldn't the best way to fight spam be via spam? i.e. grab all mail addresses from the spam mail and subscribe them to every mailing list on the planet using something like avalanche, it wouldn't stop them from sending, but at least they'd end up with no useable replies

This used to work in the early days oof spam. A friend once sent a forged mail to a spammer with another spammer's address in the From:. Both spammers replied automatically, and their servers quickly went down. Unfortunately, spammers have grown a lot more devious since those days.

OT:Trying to block spam is like...

[Secrity]

I rather prefer a front yard that has rocks rather than turf as you don't have to water or mow rocks. I used to live in an area that was a high plains desert and xeriscaping (which includes lots of rocks) is a most logical method of landscaping in areas that have little rainfall.

Re:I call bullshit.

[geminidomino]

For starters, Spamhaus is based in the UK (that's what this whole fracas is about), so it's not hard to imagine that some people OUTSIDE the U.S. might be using it, Jackoff.

I say trick David Linhard into visitin england ...

[Weezul]

... so they can throw his ass in jail !!

Re:Truth at last

[Tim C]

Spam is not a Microsoft problem, spam is a clueless user problem. It's just as easy to write a trojan spam bot that works under Linux or OS X as it is to write one that runs under Windows. All you need to do is trick someone into installing it as root/admin. Right now that's unlikely, as there are (relatively) so few Linux boxes and the maintainers and users are (relatively) so much more clued-up about this sort of thing. If the masses ever migrate away from Windows, they'll be just as clueless and likely to root themselves on their new platform.

I'm not defending MS (who have worked quite hard to make PCs easier to use, with the side effect that the more clueless user can use them) or denigrating Linux. I'm just pointing out that actually spam is a social problem; the average user doesn't know enough to keep their machines clean. A lot of users don't even care, as long as their machine works for them, they don't care who it might be working against.

Education is our only hope. Personally, I think we're doomed.

Get your Admin on...

[Beefslaya]

Configure your fucking mail servers right...and you won't have a problem.

Check your DNS, that's the easiest thing you can do, and call your ISP to setup the RDNS, and make sure any server that has a job on the Internet has a proper A record.

Second, block senders without DNS records.

Third, don't allow mail forwarding to another account, and don't allow invalid recipient bounces.

And finally, use a real MTA like Postfix. Exchange 2000 or 2003 don't have half of the security, and compliance features that Postfix has. At a minimum, put a Postfix MTA in front of your Exchange boxes. Here is one here... http://www.freespamfilter.org/. Pick your flavor of *NIX and go with it.

It's that easy.

Evil bit set for me...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Spamhaus taking them to the UK court for spamming (illegal in the UK). Then, when they don't turn up and Spamhaus wins by default, the judge orders the e360 website removed and (because this is an illegal rather than civil breach) extradition to the UK of the site owners.

Re:Bullshit

[91degrees]

Care to explain how a "on list" response doesn't end up in a block?

Not all Spamhaus users use only Spamhaus to block spam. Many other use it as just part of a blocking system. Some spam systems may attempt to resend if it's blocked. Some email systems may cache the result of the request.

Also, note the weasel words "More than 90% of of all email is now spam". This is not the same as saying "Spamhaus blocks 90% of all email traffic", yet the conclusion drawn from this assumes that it is.

Voluntary Subscription Service

[defsdoor]

This is nonsense. Spamhaus is a voluntary list of places you might not want to allow to deliver email to you. The people that subscribe to the list do so out of choice, they can configure their servers to block or score higher (usually) based on a listing in the Spamhaus list. Where in all of this is there place for a Judge, a court or even a whiny little Spam company ? No Judge in the world can force a delisting from Spamhaus. It's no different from me posting a list of companies that I don't like - for whatever reason - and because some people see my list and also decide they aren't going to like them either - being told I must like them. This is bollocks of the most objectionable level.

When are the courts and the politicians going to start serving the people ? Corporations are all about money and self interest - start protecting the populace not the highest bidder.

Re:Voluntary Subscription Service

[kindbud]

Spamhaus is a voluntary list of places you might not want to allow to deliver email to you.

Which list is assembled randomly. Being on the list doesn't mean Spamhaus is implying anything about the organization responsible for the hosts on the addresses in that list. Being on the Spamhaus list no more or less an indictment of the activities of that organization than being on a who's who list.

NOT.

It's more than "a voluntary list" it's a blacklist. Stop pretending it's not accusing the owners of the IP address of spamming. Spamming is a crime in many jurisdictions. Spamhaus is therefore opening themselves to libel if their information is inaccurate. And so long as they keep thumbing their nose at the legal system, they will accumulate default judgments against them, like this one. You can't accuse someone of a crime, and when they call you into court to make you accountable for your accusation, laugh at them, and still expect to prevail.

Re:Voluntary Subscription Service

[defsdoor]

Spamhaus don't imply anything - YOU do. The reasons why I - as an administrator - should choose to block email from certain places are my own and nothing to do with anyone else - nor can they be altered by any legal proceeding. The fact that I choose to use a list from somewhere is my decision - not Spamhaus'. So take me to your out-of-jurisdiction court if you want.

The whole farce of SPAM - of which most still originates from the USA - is typical and similar to the USA's attitude towards most types of pollution. If it gets in the way of business then resist it. No one wants SPAM - no one - so do something right for once.

Re:Voluntary Subscription Service

[kindbud]

Spamhaus don't imply anything - YOU do.

Spamhaus tracks the Internet's Spammers, Spam Gangs and Spam Services, provides dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, and works with Law Enforcement to identify and pursue spammers worldwide.

From their home page. Ever seen it?

Re:Voluntary Subscription Service

[defsdoor]

YOU imply it - THEY infer it.

Re:Voluntary Subscription Service

[kindbud]

What the fuck ever, dude! We all see how successful that argument has been for Spamhaus. Are you their counsel?

New Domain?

[brunes69]

Call me stupid, but why doesn't Linford just get some 3rd party to register a new domain and point it at the Spamhouse servers? Then send an email to the Spamhaus clients telling them that Spamhaus may 'alternately be accessed with this domain.'

Seriously, whats the big deal about closing a domain anyway? I know if I had a big mail server using Spamhaus, the first I heard rumours of ths shutting down the domain I would have switched to IP addresses anyways. An american judge can't order a foreign ISP to revoke IP addresses after all.

Cryptographic postage works fine

[Weezul]

No money changes hands, but you may bypass the other sides spamfilters if you factor a product of large prime numbers for them, thus proving that you spend computing power on sending that email. Works like a charm!!

Re:Cryptographic postage works fine

[vivtho]

I don't know too much about the technical aspect of this option, but there are some drawbacks I see.

* Who decides the prime numbers to be multiplied? The sender? In that case it's no big deal to send a couple of thousand mails with the same product (possibly with the same timestamp, if that is also a factor in the calculation)
* If the recepient also has to calculate the product to verify the mail is legitimate, isn't the recepient also paying a penalty?

Illinois District Court

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Would anyone like to spam the Illinois district court? Just to help them understand the nature of the case.

You asked for it

[rbarreira]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(This time the spammers will be doing the filtering, and that will be quite easy [captcha.net] for them.)
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

You do not win a fight in the U.S. court system .

[WhiteWolf666]

. . . by threatening judges with impending doom.

Really. It doesn't work, unless, of course, you are the President, warning judges about terrorists.

Still, I've argued this point before; there's at least a few points of dispute regarding jurisidiction, and spamhaus should have showed up in court.

It doesn't matter if they are ultimately right; what matters is that it is not 100% clear cut, and as such, a judge will give a plaintiff a great deal of leeway in a default situation.

Re:I work for a company...

[turbidostato]

"With software the interchangeability is lost, you can't trivially replace Windows with another OS"

Would you buy a car that would only drive on the vendor's roads, use only the vendor gas and would only work with vendor supplies?

But that's what you accept on the software world. Of course, as soon as you forget about your "responsibility" as a customer (what you should ask your provider for), your provider will abuse you (by means of lock-in, in this case). It's up to you to break the ties.

Is this true?

[Purity Of Essence]

Yes, this man has no dick.

Re:Is this true?

[Spiked_Three]

No, I think he's talking about the twinky

This should be an easy case for Spamhaus to win

[Timberwolf0122]

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my case is thus.
If my client is found to be in the wrong there will be a huge increase in spam and a slowdown of the internet, I rest my Case.

"Four-fold" not realistic either

[Zaharazod]

If you use DNSBLs to help filter incoming email, you probably a) use more than one, and b) use other anti-spam techniques later in the chain. For the (medium traffic) domains I manage, I can tell you that Spamhaus is our front-line; however, messages that get past it have other blacklists to pass, and that's before they even hit our content filters.

There will certainly be some increase, but the only reason to expect a four-fold increase is if Spamhaus is your only defense. And as any seasoned mail admin knows these days, a single strategy doesn't cut it any more..

Real stats for a small mail server

[Name Anonymous]

For an average week on a small mail server:

2500 messages delived (some of it spam that made its way past the filters)

11700 blocked using RBLs

and another 18000 rejected due to invalid (or no longer valid) recipients. (some of which are abandoned usernames due to the spam level)

And remember it's not just processing power, it's all the additional disk space that would be required to store the spam. And since this server has a bandwidth cap, rejecting spam (instead of having it delivered) leaves more bandwidth for its intended purpose.

The Judge's reaction .....

[Alien54]

I can imagine the judges reaction when he realises that he decision has just sabotaged his own personal email. and the reaction of his/her friends when they find out that he/she is to blame for all of the extra spam they are suddenly getting.

Re:The Judge's reaction .....

[TubeSteak]

I can imagine the judges reaction when he realises that he decision has just sabotaged his own personal email. and the reaction of his/her friends

Assuming the Judge even thought of that, I hope he dismissed it out of hand.

Judges are there to rule on legal matters, not the personal fallout of their decisions.

"Judicial impartiality" isn't supposed to be an empty phrase.

Re:The Judge's reaction .....

[KarmaMB84]

His e-mail is probably filtered by some poor clerk.

Re:The Judge's reaction .....

[Shakrai]

I can imagine the judges reaction when he realises that he decision has just sabotaged his own personal email. and the reaction of his/her friends when they find out that he/she is to blame for all of the extra spam they are suddenly getting.

Actually that has happened in the past. Years after the Bell System divestiture, Judge Harold H. Greene found himself unable to order local phone service. Why? Because the system had gotten so chaotic that he couldn't find the right person to talk to who could take the order!

Ah, sometimes I think the Universe does have a sense of irony after all.

Re:A small counterpoint

[Dunbal]

they'd have to prove to the court they aren't spammers

      Don't you love that "innocent until proven guilty" concept? Oh, wait...

Re:You do not win a fight in the U.S. court system

[CowboyBob500]

They are not subject to the US court system. If it was me in this position I'd be sending the judge an e-mail with a picture of me holding up my middle finger. Then I'd move my operations to a .org.uk address and notify my customers.

Bob

Re:I say trick David Linhard into visitin england

[Haeleth]

... so they can throw his ass in jail !!

Why would imprisoning a donkey help? Does he use it to carry all his luggage for him or something?

Complain to the USERS of spamhous

[houghi]

They are the ones that are actually doing the blocking.

What they can do if the domain is suspended is to have domains available in each and every country in the world.

As so many providers use the service as well, donating domains should be not an issue. Each and every time some domains could be donated and people just pick 10 of them so that if one is down due to a legal issue, another can be used.

The best solution is indeed to just open the floods for one day. Unfortunatly sept, 18th is already past, because it would have been the releasedate that could have been named after this movie

Quantum mechanics.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have finite number of messages in the inbox, percentage of spam could only take some specific values and 99.9999% is not one among them.

Spam percentage of a 474 message inbox could only be 100%, 99.78903%, 99.57805%, 99.367089%, 99.156118% ....

Thought it would be funny, but it is not, but I am not going to waste all that typing calculation I did, so will hide behind anonymity ;-)

Re:Quantum mechanics.

[Andrew Kismet]

This post is probably the greatest use of "Post Anonymously" ever.

Re:Quantum mechanics.

[PhoenixFlare]

Thought it would be funny, but it is not, but I am not going to waste all that typing calculation I did, so will hide behind anonymity ;-)

Oh, it is :) Being friends with a couple hard-core math geeks, i've gotten used to it :)

please mod parent insightful not funny!

[davros-too]

wish I had mod points. Yes, the parent is witty, but more importantly it is spot on. I've seen this before, but it really can't be repeated too many times in my view.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something

[argStyopa]

But aren't these emails ALREADY hitting email servers? It sounds like this speculation is FUD-y.

I mean, it's not like Spamhaus somehow redirects the emails to itself like some sort of Intarweb spam-specific black hole.

As I understand it:
1. Spam is sent by spammer (it's taking bandwidth). Because of how mail packets flow through multiple redundant paths, each mail takes up bandwidth many times its raw packet size.
2. Spam hits email server (it's taking CPU time to process)
3. Email server checks against Spamhaus blacklist (dunno if this is bandwidth, CPU, or both - I'm not terribly familiar if Spamhaus caches that information locally at its client sites)
4. Spam is rejected (taking CPU time)
5. Rejection reply generated/sent (? dunno if it does this; would take CPU+bandwidth both)

So Spamhaus disappears. Yes, it would suck as a email user to get flooded with spam, but would this REALLY cause any more work for the mailservers? I could see (if they are generating rejection replies and sending them) that this might actually be LESS work for CPUs and less bandwidth used.

Re:Maybe I'm misunderstanding something

[Cheeze]

no, you use spamhaus as a black list, so connections to your mail server would be dropped if they are on the list.

Therefore, the mail server doesn't have to process the spam.

take out the spamhaus, and the mail server will have to process the spam.

Re:Maybe I'm misunderstanding something

[KingNaught]

Wrong, email servers never receive the smam email becuase the reject connections from spam server IP address entirley.

Re:Maybe I'm misunderstanding something

[guitaristx]

But aren't these emails ALREADY hitting email servers? It sounds like this speculation is FUD-y.

I mean, it's not like Spamhaus somehow redirects the emails to itself like some sort of Intarweb spam-specific black hole.

As I understand it:
1. Spam is sent by spammer (it's taking bandwidth). Because of how mail packets flow through multiple redundant paths, each mail takes up bandwidth many times its raw packet size.
2. Spam hits email server (it's taking CPU time to process)
3. Email server checks against Spamhaus blacklist (dunno if this is bandwidth, CPU, or both - I'm not terribly familiar if Spamhaus caches that information locally at its client sites)
4. Spam is rejected (taking CPU time)
5. Rejection reply generated/sent (? dunno if it does this; would take CPU+bandwidth both)

So Spamhaus disappears. Yes, it would suck as a email user to get flooded with spam, but would this REALLY cause any more work for the mailservers? I could see (if they are generating rejection replies and sending them) that this might actually be LESS work for CPUs and less bandwidth used.

The way that spamhaus works is by blacklisting IP addresses, not email-specific details of mail coming from those IP addresses. Therefore, email servers can reject the TCP connections from the blacklisted IP address ranges; it is no more complicated (and no more resource-intensive) than IP-address-specific firewall rules. Therefore, the spam messages themselves don't ever get sent and the only bandwidth "wasted" on spam is from the TCP SYN packets that never get a reply.

Re:Maybe I'm misunderstanding something

[riley]

It's resource economics and timing of connection blocking:

With spamhaus

1) Network connection is attempted and accepted by the mail server (a small amount of bandwidth and cpu).
2) A DNS lookup is made by the mail server for the incoming connection (DNS udp packets are relatively cheap -- a small amount of bandwidth and CPU used)
3) If the lookup exists in spamhaus, the mail server responds with a 550 error message (small amount of bandwidth and CPU)

Without spamhaus

1) Network connection is attempted and accepted (same as above)
2) One or more messages are sent over the network connection (much more bandwidth)
3) Possibly, those messages are checked by content filters top see if they are spam (MUCH higher CPU and memory costs -- content filtering isn't cheap)
4) Accepted or rejected...accepting costs more than rejecting.

The good thing about DNS RBLs is that they block the connection prior to any message being sent across. They are based entirely on the recorded behavior of the incoming IP address.

So, without spamhaus or a similar blocklist, the amount of CPU and storage necessary to keep email going is much higher than with spamhaus.

Re:gabble???? Uh, gavel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to Julie Gabble from Geometry class. She's been banged so many times she walks funny.

Re:I work for a company...

[KDR_11k]

How many sellers actually offer interchangeable software? Sure, you can replace your Linux distro relatively easy but what if you wanted to e.g. exchange your office suite or 3d graphics applkication for another one? At very least you'll have to convert everything you're working on into the new application's native format and deal with importing deficiencies (i.e. lost in translation).

What domains do they block?

[capica]

I have been getting a lot of spam which wasn't blocked by blacklists (including Spamhaus) and it was not sent by some hacked Win machine (because graylisting would kill it). But it still gets through (although Bayes marks it).
Why it isn't blocked by blacklists? Look at the headers:
Received: from mail.blancalle.com (mail.blancalle.com [69.51.15.35])
Received: by mail.blancalle.com (PowerMTA(TM) v3.0c2)
Received: from mail.Nomegoze.com (mail.nomegoze.com [75.126.42.135])
Received: from mail.riverpins.com (mail.riverpins.com [66.97.162.150])
It is fully featured mail server dedicated for spamming. When you go to www.domainname, it usually says that they help market blah blah...
Question: how to stop them? I have tried many blacklists, no one lists them. Is it because they give an "opt-out" solution?

I work for a spam filtering company

[walterbyrd]

I think all sides are idiotic.

Where I work, if somebody is incorrectly identified as a spammer, that person can contact us, and we work to resolve the issue. It happens all of the time.

On the other hand, Spamhaus is not the only organization capable of filtering spam. If Spamhaus went away, spam would still be filtered.

I doubt the judge has jurisdiction, and I think the judge knows it.

They should have fought it.

[sgt scrub]

The domain is issued by an american, still, organization. If they would have showed up in court. Hoped that the judge was competent enough to understand that nothing gets blocked by spamhaus unless an email administrator has set up rbl checks via spamhaus.

Oh well. Should have. Could have. Water under the bridge. It is time to make spamhaus a redundant system. Anyone care to estimate the amount of bandwidth needed to mirror the service?

gmail

[pipatron]

Have you people never heard of gmail?

Re:gmail

[CastrTroy]

Yes, however, I didn't feel like subscribing to a third webmail service. I guess I could drop Yahoo, but it does a good enough job for me. With Yahoo, only about 1% of the spam gets through. Plus doing all that and having to get all my contacts to start sending me mail at a different address is just a pain.

Re:gmail

[AberBeta]

Then drop Hotmail; that is a no brainer.

Re:gmail

[Maxo-Texas]

Hotmail is my "throwdown" account for new business.
It's whitemailed for all my current approved contacts.
If a business plays nice for long enough- then they get access to one of my 'real' email accounts.

The world will have to adjust

[bigtrike]

If spam is made more of a problem, there will have to be adjustments. Spam is mostly sent from shady ISPs, hacked/worm infested machines which act as relay drones, and nations which don't deal with these things well. The blacklisting will have to be done manually, meaning that allowing spam to come from your networks may have much larger penalties for those who tolerate it. Hurricane electric and most asian nations will likely be the first entries in my blacklist.

I doubt that the mail servers will choke

[Mycroft_514]

Since most of the filtering is done on the recieving side anyway. Now end users on the other hand will see a big uptick in spam.

I just don't want to see a precident set by the court.

Re:I doubt that the mail servers will choke

[Cheeze]

I don't think you understand how mail servers work. Spamhaus is used as a smtp filter, so when an ip connects, the smtp server looks up the message in the Spamhaus dns black list. If the ip address is present, it disconnects the ip from the smtp server.

that means the spam doesn't have to touch other parts of the mail system.

If you are doing 100,000 messages per day, and spamhaus is filtering 75% of the connections, that means if spamhaus is turned off, you will probably be somewhere around 400,000. Most mail servers are scaled with around 50% over capacity. Good luck being able to handle the load.

Re:Exactly, mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mod up people who say "could of".

which will create legitimate spam

[deevnil]

With a tax it would be illegal to block paid for mail, a federal offense probably. Then we would just get /different/ spam, like for chevy trucks and pepsi-cola.

Been There- Done That

[PhYrE2k2]

Been There- Done That.

We block roughly 96% of Spam on average (at times of day 85% and at other times of day 99% depending on actual volume) and tag a few percent of 'maybes' on top of that. Every once in a while someone will whine about how they are getting so much Spam and that these Spam filters are useless. So I tell them I'll take it off for 24 hours. A few thousand e-mails to some of their inboxes later and I receive a praise letter and small gift in the mail.

In any case, folks complain like anything about the 3-5 Spam e-mail messages they get a day (most of which are tagged) and have no real view as to what is actually out there. It's like taking out someones immune system for a day (except they won't die of course).

More important would be how the e-mail system would survive with 10-30 second delays on every mail as the spamhaus lookups fail.

-M

Re:Been There- Done That

[nuzak]

> A few thousand e-mails to some of their inboxes later and I receive a praise letter and small gift in the mail.

I can only imagine the card says "Switched to a professional company not staffed with vindictive admins who sabotage our operations. Consider this a parting gift. Don't call."

Re:Been There- Done That

[PhYrE2k2]

Whoa Whoa Whoa- they said that they didn't need the filter on (which we had on by default) and asked for it to be turned off. Who am I to deny them the Spam they are asking for.

All I'm saying is that many foliks don't realize the sheer volume of crap that is stopped at the SMTP level due to RBLs, manually denying IPs, manually denying Spam domains, SpamAssassin and so on. These are folks who had Spam features installed when they were getting 5 Spam messages a day before the sheet volume of Spam increased on the net. They fail to realize that 90-something percent of all e-mail is junk, and many of these folks send their e-mail everywhere they can.

All I'm saying is that on long-term e-mail addresses, folks don't realize how much Spam senders they actually accumulate and how much is actually being blocked. The same ones that complain about the 5 that they get a day, and want those stopped, not realizing that there are 50 that are blocked for every one that shows up in your inbox.

So by your comment, you want us to deny their request and tell them that if they want unfiltered e-mail, they should go find a company that can actually provide the service that they're specifically asking for. Hrm- that seems worse for business does it not?

-M

Re: out of office auto-replies

[King_TJ]

Honestly, the "out of office" autoreply feature (most notably used in MS Outlook) could use some work. For starters, it really needs to be designed so users turning it on are immediately prompted for whether they'd like it to respond to all incoming email, or only to internal corporate mail. Quite often, I've emailed a salesperson at some company, only to get back an auto-reply that's intended only for other employees of his/her business -- not outside customers.

Re:It could be worse

[MetalPlates]

Or is it really the leather industry who has won?

Sony
Nintendo
Microsoft

Spam

[certel]

This would be a terrible thing if this were to happen. Obviously, the judge has no conception of what this could cause.

Does spam filtering enable spamming?

[lamplighter]

After all, if the percentage of all emails that are spam actually REACHED 100%, nobody would use email and spamming would be pointless. Attempts to keep Internet email useful, therefore, are also what is keeping spam alive.

Re:I work for a company...

[Nimey]

It seems to me that you should send such critical information out-of-band. I would think that a dedicated modem link would be sufficient, and you can get a couple of good USR Courier modems for less than 500 USD; that's peanuts to such a big corp.

FTM why aren't your PHBs investing money in your email system?

servers choking...

[ninjaz]

First, some stats on the mail server I use from a year ago yesterday and yesterday:

October 15 2005 :

Pieces of spam blocked by realtime blocklists: 9062

Top blocklists:
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org 7193
bl.spamcop.net 1648
dnsbl.njabl.org 221

October 15 2006:

Pieces of spam blocked by realtime blocklists: 47429

Top blocklists:
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org 40631
bl.spamcop.net 5240
dnsbl.njabl.org 1558

As spamhaus is currently rejecting 40631 emails which consequently don't have to be processed by spamassassin, it would be definitely be felt on this server were Spamhaus to become available. In fact, the reason I started using RBLs to begin with was due to one of the Spamhaus ROKSO culprits sending about 20,000 messages per hour to a dictionary list of users at a hosted domain. The server was dying then, but using OpenBSD's pf databases together with the spamhaus SBL, the problem was stopped cold.

Re:servers choking...

[ninjaz]

But if you moved sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org to third it would stop less spam because spamcop or njabl would have blocked it... many spammers are on all three lists. Which ever list you put first will get more hits.

Right, I have them listed first because it was the only one at the time of the problem which had the attacker listed. I think it is due to their approach, how they really do stay on top of which networks are being used by which spammers.

Re:servers choking...

[soulprivate]

Let me share my numbers from yesterday with you :

sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org 894.433
bl.spamcop.net 162.456
dnsbl.njabl.org 69.587
Total : 1,126,476

We use RBL's to *block* here, not for any other calculation. We have done so for almost 4 years. I receive 1 or 2 complaints a month for false positives.

We cannot afford to pass the extra traffic to our antispam appliances, because we would have to duplicate the required cpu power, and they don't come cheap (I don't have USD 200.000 in my pockets right now). My current mail server software does not support greylisting either, and change is not an option.

I live in Chile. Not in Illinois, not in the USA, not in the UK. But an incredibly stupid judge in IL is about to cripple my business.

And what will happen when e360 or someone else decides that Spamcop harms his business? and NJABL is also a nuisance? and if he believes that Senderbase is invading his privacy by counting his messages?

Almost all commercial antispam products rely on several network-based layers *before* a message is passed through content filters analyzers, to avoid high cpu usages. RBL's are the first and main. You take away that layer, and voila, you are choked. I have seen misconfigured IronPorts go south because of problems like this.

Re:I work for a company...

[Silver Sloth]

You should be fired.

Maybe you mean that the person who decides that an e-mail server which is 75% loaded is underutilised, despite being made aware of the risks involved, should be fired. I'll tell the CIO that an AC from /. says he should be fired, I'm sure he'll take it well!

Let's Roll

[gx5000]

I really don't care if they're being drama queens about it...
The US courts have nothing on a UK entity..
And maybe in doing so they will solicit more people into the fray...
let the flood gates open, ready or not, learning can be a painful experience for anyone...

Meanwhile I just want to grab a chev and a few shotguns and find these guys...
How we've let the ISP's and such let us believe that they are powerless
to kill 99% of SPAM is beyond me. I say we track down the parasites and take
them down ! (Metaphorically speaking that is...)

Sure thing, 'Anonymous' Coward (wink, wink)

[Lactoso]

I don't know what's sadder - that the GP/Parent so blatantly fakes a reply to his own post (#16451281) or that his ploy actually works and he gets modded up.

I did like the way the poster's poor grammar is consistent in both posts though...(read the following in 'HULK SMASH' voice)

GP - "Spamhaus could of done a better job in front of jury."
PARENT - "Damn, why no mod points right now."

Fold != multiplied by

[melandy]

Original:

More than 90% of of all email is now spam, Cox says, and he doubts that servers worldwide would be able to handle a ten-fold increase in traffic.

Editor:

Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold

Ok, this is a pet peeve, and sorry for the rant, but this is /. afterall... The phrase you are looking for here is "increased by a factor of n", not "increased n-fold".

The phrase "increase by n-fold" means that the value would increase by a factor of 2^n, not by a factor of n. The terminology comes from the idea of folding some physical object in half. For example, if you fold a piece of paper in half, the overall thickness increases by a factor of 2 (or 2^1). Fold it again, and the overall thickness increases from the original by a factor of 4 (2^2). These are examples of increasing by one- and two-fold, respectively.

In the example in the original submission, the amount of unblocked email traffic (10% of all email traffic) if increased by ten-fold, would increase to 10240% of all email traffic, which is clearly impossible.

In the editor's example, the amount of unblocked email traffic (25% of all email traffic) if increased by four-fold, would increase to 400% of all email traffic. This is also clearly impossible.

The correct phrases to use in these cases are "increase by a factor of ten" and "increased by a factor of four" respectively.

$rant_mode='off';

-m

Re:WRONG!

[Goaway]

Hah hah hah hah, funny man!

Re:It could be worse

[Forge]

You don't really have to.

1. If you don't update your Spamhous block list it will take time for Spamers to change IPs and start sending from unblocked addresses. The flood will come gradually.

2. How many of the email admins on Slashdot are ready willing and able to start grabbing SPAM lists from spamhouse.co.uk ?

I think the threat is slightly overblown. Reminds me of Y2K.

60K spam

[kisrael]

The best way to get enough spam to swamp almost any filter is to fwd all mail for a domain to a single inbox.

Google has reported 60K spam over the last 30 days, and about 10 messages in hour still get through to my inbox.

Worse is these asscactuses start sending mail that looks like it was from my domain, so I get all the bounces, and look like an asshole myself.

That one Russian spammer who was savagely murdered... it's hard to drum up sufficient sympathy for that.

If all the world is bending over backwards to find new ways of plugging their ears, stop yelling.

Re:60K spam

[Beardo the Bearded]

If all the world is bending over backwards to find new ways of plugging their ears, stop yelling.

That's the problem. Not everyone is plugging their ears. There are enough dumb people (or gullible, or clueless) that continue to buy products pitched by the spammers that it's still financially lucrative.

I could probably quit my job, become a spammer, and make more money.

As the oft-posted /. checklist states, there's not really a solution. Legislation won't do anything - look at the arguments we've got here. UK and Canadian companies don't have to comply with US law, and those are your friends. What about China, Russia, Buttnowhereistan, or Nigeria? The spammers will move to other countries outside of US jurisdiction.

It's not a war. It's just the free market. There are no rules preventing spamming and you make money when you do it. Therefore, it will continue.

The alternative - having the governments or DoS vigilantes deciding what can be placed on the tubes - is far worse that anything any spammer can do.

Non-Issue

[Rayin]

The governing body of internet domain names, ICANN, has been advised of the proposed order. It says however that it cannot comply with any such order as it has neither the ability nor the authority to do so. Only the internet registrar with which the registrant has a contractual relationship can suspend an individual domain name, ICANN says.

If even ICANN says it won't comply, and the judge hasn't even signed the order, why is this a big deal, and furthermore, how is this "heating up?" Sounds to me like a bunch of fuss about a non-issue. Now, if ICANN was actually going to comply, then we'd have something to talk about.

Re:It could be worse

[thc69]

No, it's Microsoft:
Sorry,
Nerds.
Microsoft!

I'll disagree.

[khasim]

Without a blacklisting site, greylisting will not be effective TOMORROW.

It's simple for the spammers to re-send their spam floods. The only issue today is that the spam flood will trigger spam traps run by the blacklists. So there's not much reason for the spammers to send the flood again because the people using greylisting will probably also use blacklists.

If the blacklists weren't there, greylisting would be easily bypassed with a second flood.

"Defense in Depth". You have to use multiple layers and multiple approaches and they have to be inter-linked.

Re:I'll disagree.

[arivanov]

Fair point. But spamhaus is not the only RBL out there.

If it was not there we would have implemented it. So the threat of RBLs and spamtraps will always be there which means that greylisting will continue to be effective.

In addition to that many ISPs (f.e. BT in the UK) are currently looking into traffic analysis and admission control which will take zombies off the network after the first 1-2 messages they produce. This will make greylisting even more effective then now.

Re:It could be worse

[thc69]

Ooh, even more accurate:
Microsoft
Screws
Nerds

Bouldercrap I say

[valhalla1980]

1. Tucows seems to be the registrar for spamhaus.org. They seem to be Canada based and will probably laugh at a court from Illinois telling them what to do. And if ICANN has a half a brain (which they have) they won't touch this. The international community would flip... 2. Spam protection should be in layers just like all security protection. Should one fail or let something slip through then another layer should catch it. I very seriously doubt that Spamhaus would be forced to shut down. And if they did shutdown then I very much doubt the impact would be anywhere near what the claims are.

Call me an Idiot (and I'm sure someone will)

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

...but for all thier bitching and moaning about this, they haven't actually done a thing in thier own defense. Further, being in the UK (as they have pointed out on many occasions now), why do they not just get a nice little .or.uk? All of this "the world is going to end" crap actually makes me think alot less or them. It's really thier own fault for ignoring the litigation, even if they had intention of complying to begin with.

increase in traffic?

[jefp]

A ten-fold or four-fold increase in traffic - either number assumes that mail admins use spamhaus's list as their one and only spam filter. My guess is such systems are rare to non-existent. In fact what will happen if spamhaus goes away is that the other layers of filtering will take up the slack. Most sites won't even notice the change.

Mod parent up: +1 Definitely Funny

[thc69]

Every time I come here, it seems I'm saddled with damned mod points. Now, when I need them...

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why people don't mod up mod up posts like this one (#16452955) since it is not a ploy for being modded up.

I like the way the parent pokes fun at the GP and GGP because they are consistent in bad grammar.

GP - "Damn, why no mod points right now."
PARENT - "(read the following in 'HULK SMASH' voice)"

Jeen-yus!

Re:MOD PARENT UP!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

No, seriously. Mod parent up. That was funny.

*twitch*

[goofyspouse]

"More common" does not equal "correct", unfortunately. Like "try and" (rather than "try to"), "could of" is just plain wrong.

Now where did I leave my gabble?

Re:*twitch*

[thc69]

"Try and" used to fly under my radar. Now I'll notice it every time. Thanks a lot, jerk! ;)

Re:*twitch*

[mooingyak]

Maybe you should just try and ignore it.

Re:*twitch*

[orgelspieler]

I was once "corrected" by a senior engineer when I wrote "try to" in a white paper. What a moron. I hate hypercorrections.

Re:*twitch*

[Zixia]

"try and" ... is just plain wrong.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtryand.htm l

Re:*twitch*

[mojine]

I can't seem to try and ignore it. I would of if I could of ...

Re:I work for a company...

[turbidostato]

"At very least you'll have to convert everything you're working on into the new application's native format and deal with importing deficiencies"

Which part of "Would you buy a car that would only drive on the vendor's roads, use only the vendor gas and would only work with vendor supplies?" didn't you understand?

"native format/vendor lock-in" doesn't rise a bell in your brain?

Good To See...

[eno2001]

...that we're not the only ones. I've seen the rate of blocked spam messages on our spam firewall increase from 75% to 97% in the past few months. That means only 3% of our total message stream is allowed through as "legit" and our users are STILL seeing about 20 spam messages a day. So this, is apparently normal e-mail in this day and age? Sad.

Why RBLs are superior

[mabu]

Relay blacklisting is based around a list of known IP addresses that the SMTP server refuses to accept mail from, so if a spammer (usually a zombie PC) connects to port 25, the IP address is checked against the blacklist, if the IP is blacklisted (i.e. it's Verizon, Comcast or Qwest broadband space -- a common RBL IP block because those asshats don't police their zombie PCs) the server will instantly HANG UP on the connection. This takes a few milliseconds and virtually no bandwidth. More than 90% of most SMTP connections are dropped by systems that use RBL.

Compare this with content-based filtering where the SMTP server sits there and wastes precious bandwidth, cpu power and other resources churning through the spam garbage data, saving it, analyizing it, etc., only to find out it's junk e-mail and then either deleting or quarantining it. The amount of resources consumed by content-based filter systems is EXPONENTIALLY GREATER than relay blacklist filters.

This is why most ISPs mail services would literally choke if they turned off relay blacklisting as a means to stop spammers. There are literally millions of safe IP address lists that should not be sending mail that a smart postmaster will configure his server to completely ignore -- not even accept any mail content and waste bandwidth (*cough* Comcast, Brazil, most of China, Korea, etc. *cough*)

It works. It works very well. Without RBL, your mail server is in for a world of pain.

If you aren't using RBL, then you're just pissing away precious, expensive resources.

Re:I work for a company...

[WuphonsReach]

For example, one of our customers requires that financial information it sent to the Bank of England by close of play every day. It is sent using (encrypted) e-mail.

Why, for the sake of all that is holy, are you using a "best-effort" delivery system with no guarantee on message transit time for a system that requires messages to be received by a certain time? Nothing in the SMTP protocol guarantees delivery, so unless you have setup your mail servers to be extremely aggressive at timing out message delivery attempts, mail can take up to a few days to be delivered (at the outside).

Switch to scp or sftp for time-sensitive transmissions.

MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL!!!

[frank_adrian314159]

The bottom line is that the law means something or it doesn't. The decision may not have been the one most sysadmins (or even users) hoped for (and God knows it's not the one I would have wanted), but it was decided within the rules of the law and in accordance of the law as written now. I would hate to think that a judge would make a decision based on what his friends and neighbors might think. This is supposed to be a country of laws. Should it ever not be, that would be a very bad thing.

So stop the judge-bashing. Cases are not supposed to be decided on pragmatic issues when the pragma directly violates previous jurisprudence - legislation is the solution to pragmatics not matching current judicial findings. The bottom line is that Spamhaus f*cked up by not appearing in court. They should have. And, because of that, the judge rendered judgement in a proper fashion. If Spamhaus didn't understand the impact that not showing up in court would have on them (especially if they already had the wherewithal to hire a lawyer to file motions with said court), then they have no one to blame but themselves.

Spamhaus is now free to ignore the court's ruling (they are, of course, based in another country with servers in a third and can do so with relative impunity). The court is also now free to attempt to enforce its judgement in any way it sees fit within the bounds of the law. That's the way the system works. If you don't like it, change the system. Don't bitch at the actors who are merely doing their jobs (and, in fact, appearing to be doing so in an relatively competant way).

Re:MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL!!!

[bjohnson]

The bottom line is that the law means something or it doesn't. The decision may not have been the one most sysadmins (or even users) hoped for (and God knows it's not the one I would have wanted), but it was decided within the rules of the law and in accordance of the law as written now. I would hate to think that a judge would make a decision based on what his friends and neighbors might think. This is supposed to be a country of laws. Should it ever not be, that would be a very bad thing.

This is precisely what happens when you elect judges.

IN this case, the action was taken by a federal judge, who are appointed, not elected, but many state judges have to run for office.

In Ohio, they've found a state judge who finds infavor of campaign contributors 90% of the time, and one decision by the state Supreme Court that was split 4-3, exactly along the lines of donation by the two parties in the lawsuit. (one side contributed to the four, the other to the three)

Justice isn't only not blind in Ohio, hell, it's for rent.

Spammers

[Bartmoss]

I am serious: If any politican would seek to introduce the death penalty for spammers, he'd have my vote. I have lived with this nonsense now for ten years, and my patience is wearing thin.

I agree that spam email is about 90% of traffic. In my case the ratio is probably even higher. I get a lot of spam. Most of it gets filtered out by spamcop.

If RBLs suddenly became unavailable, the only - and I do mean only - option for me would be to reject any email that doesn't come with correct sender verification of some sort, say, SPF. Then, once spammers start using those systems too I'd have to start whitelisting senders.

I really can't believe that the US is putting up with that. I think only judges who have no email account could even agree to hear such a case.

Forget email...

[bforsse]

MySpace is a much more efficient way to communicate anyways.

Re:I work for a company...

[KDR_11k]

Yes but we're looking at a market that only offers cars that run on their own set of roads each.

Re:I say let the suits come?

[Xtifr]

If Spamhaus does this voluntarily, just to prove a point, and the results are as bad as some predict (overloaded servers losing emails resulting in financial damages to companies in the millions or hundreds of millions of dollars), Spamhaus could be in much worse legal trouble than they are right now. On the other hand, if they do it involuntarily because the US courts force their domain to be shut down, then they can't be held liable for the consequences of that action. The US government, on the other hand...

If I (still) worked for a huge email or Internet service provider, I would have my team on full alert, and would be busy talking to legal about our possible options for trying to prevent anyone (Spamhaus or the courts) from abruptly shutting down this service, and to vendors and the finance department about the possibility of getting emergency extra storage if needed. I'm surprised I haven't heard of some big ISPs trying to get the injunction blocked already. (Although, since I don't still work for a huge email provider, I don't know what legal's response would have been, which might explain it.)

Spamhaus is part of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Spamhaus should pull the plug. All the way. They are working to prolong something that totally sucks. Shut down Spamhaus. Let email totally tank. Let the traffic explode.

Then grab your torches and pitchforks and go after the freak'n spammers. I'm talk'n heads on pikes in the town square.

That's the way to fix smtp.

Re:Truth at last

[ZorbaTHut]

All you need to do is trick someone into installing it as root/admin.

Why do you need to do that? Last time I checked, it was possible to send email from a normal user account.

I do agree that Linux makes root access much harder than Windows does, but it turns out that root access really isn't needed for most interesting (read: profitable) exploits.

SpamCop

[jroysdon]

On my mailserver, if Spamhaus SBL-XBL fails to return an answer, SpamCop's BL will still be up and working. I've got my MTA configured to check for both. In the past day, Spamhaus SBL-XBL has rejected 25,791 emails and after checking through that list SpamCop has found an additional 4,256 emails to block. If I switch which service is checked first, the numbers are roughly the same (SpamCop will catch ~80% and Spamhaus will catch the other 20%). I'm sure any ISP mail admin knows at least this much.

However, that other 20% that Spamhaus SBL-XBL would have blocked will then get through, and SpamAssassin will start checking against SURBL.org for spam-vertized domains in the email content and catch the rest. This is at a much larger CPU cost to use SpamAssassin than using Spamhaus SBL-XBL on the MTA before it even accepts the email.

BTW, SpamAssassin with SURBL and a number of other filters (pyzor, dcc) still tagged another 5,135 emails as spam (I don't auto-delete, just add headers).

That's pretty scary to me that my system, which houses a few domains for friends and family, has blocked/tagged 35182 spam messages in the last 24 hours.

Re:It could be worse

[Shads]

*yawn*

Really. Spamhaus is a nice service, don't get me wrong. I use them in addition to ~10-12 other methods to block spam (uri, greylisting, bayes, etc) by my math and based on the filters my personal domains have (14 domains and a few hundred email addresses (1200 message/day)) and the filters the company I work (28000 messages/day) for and the company I previously worked for (ISP, 550k msgs/day) are using and statistics generated off of those numbers, spamhaus individually is blocking ~4% of my total spam and ~7.25% for the combination of my previous job and current job. URI blacklists are removing a massively higher percentage of spam these days. Now mind, I'm not dealing with the numbers of some of the large sites on the net, and I don't rely on just one method of spam reduction... I don't think many competent mail admins do these days.

Maybe spamhaus is right... but I really don't think so.

Of course

[Kelz]

SOME servers will choke.

Their clients will start having bigger penises!

Re:I work for a company...

[RubberDuckie]

Hear, hear. I'm in the same boat where I work. Our mail servers have been running on the edge for over six months now. Management is aware of the problem, but other priorities are always more important. That is, until a mail for the CEO is delayed, then the mail server replacement project moves to the top of the list. Life in corporate America, sigh.

Can some one educate me ?

[teknosapien]

I'm wondering why there haven't been a bunch of small claims filed in small claims court against the people that hire this type of person/service , or even why both are not named in suites like this it is after all isn't unsolicited spam against the law? . If enough were filed would this not send a clear message to the types that use this tactic.

Re:Not according to Fox

[swb]

Fox and the rest of the Mexican aristocracy wants to get rid of as many poor people as he can before they have a revolution (and/or degrade into Guatemala-style mayhem). The US is his safety valve.

Amnesty is a mistake, it only will encourage more illegal immigrants (the amnesty deadline is always 18 months ahead of time).

IMHO, we need to seal the border to keep illegals out and fine businesses that hire them here in the US $10,000 a day for every day they hire illegals.

Take down the internet!

[swordgeek]

I'd love to see all of the spam-fighting services go on strike for a week. DNS blackholes, spam filters, the works. Let spam flow uninterrupted. Let every user on the internet see just how bad spam really is. THAT would get some useful laws in place, and some criminals behind bars.

Unfortunately, too much of the IT economy is closely tied to fighting spam, and they can't afford to let that happen.

spamhaus.co.uk.. ICAN touch that?

[james_moriarty]

Here's a stupid question: what if spamhaus moved to a .co.uk domain? Does ICAN still have control over it? Wouldn't it side-step the issue completely?

/confused

Re:I work for a company...

[Vadim Makarov]

You are not planning properly. With such an unpredictable thing as incoming email delivery attempts, the infrastructure should be able to handle a sudden several fold increase at least. It's OK to have your server utilised by more than 50% of its capacity, but then it must have a graceful failure mode.

For example, mail servers of my provider (pair.com) would drop the resource-consuming Bayesian check if the server becomes overloaded (and possibly other checks if the situation gets worse, but I've never seen that). It occasionally results in a few spams slipping into customer's inboxes, but nothing like a total communication outage.

Re:I work for a company...

[Vadim Makarov]

Take Google off your list. For the majority of uses, changing a search engine is as easy as typing a different URL. People use Google because it currently is the best.

Doh! Extra explanation needed.

[edunbar93]

Gaa. I feel like a dolt for having to reply to my own post.

The line "Number of messages rejected because they were spam:" represents mail filtered out by SpamAssassin. Mail is filtered in the order seen here, with "wrong e-mail" first, then RBL, then Spamassassin and virus filtering.

Re:I work for a company...

[turbidostato]

"Yes but we're looking at a market that only offers cars that run on their own set of roads each."

That's wrong for the most part. It only makes *easier* to find lockin-enabled apps than "proper" ones, and it's no surprise: see my first post.

More like 90%

[heybo]

I don't know where they other guy got their numbers, but Spamhaus blocks better than 90% of the mail coming in our server. No we don't want 360's shit. Thank you Spamhaus keep up the good work!

Re:I work for a company...

[KDR_11k]

Well, then show me which apps would count as easily interchangeable.

Re:I work for a company...

[turbidostato]

You can easily exchange any two MTA (sendmail/postfix/qmail/exim), for instance.

Re:It could be worse

[Shads]

Wow, sorry to hear that, all the stuff I've implemented has been free.

Re:It could be worse

[Shads]

For my personal domains mostly exim4 because well... they're small and don't do alot of mail and exim is simple and easy to manage and integrates well with several technologies like greylisting and content based filtering while the mail is being received (eg: it doesn't have to queue the message to reject it.) For the business side mostly postfix and sendmail. As far as what is being done via various methods those would include, blacklists, av scans, probe blocking, limit max concurrent from single ips, limit max from given hosts, greylist host who send multiple spam, standard greylisting, spamassassin, uri blacklists, sender blacklists, spam traps for common names that aren't used... (eg: company uses first init, lastname@domain, then make some accounts like bob, mike, fred, john, etc...), bogofilter... there's more that i'm sure aren't coming to mind after being up for 36 hours ;P