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Verizon.net Finally Moving Email To Port 587
The Washington Post's Security Fix blog is reporting that Verizon, long identified as the largest ISP source of spam, is moving to require use of the submission port, 587, in outbound mail — and thus to require authentication. While spammers may still be able to relay spam through zombies in Verizon's network, if the victims let their mail clients remember their authentication credentials, at least the zombies will be easily identifiable. Verizon pledges to clean up their zombie problem quickly. We'll see.
I found out I was a spammer when I investigated a message returned to me. I ended up talking with someone from SORBS. After emailing SORBS a couple of times, I received this message from Michelle Sullivan: "SORBS lists IP addresses that send spam. Often there is real email mixed with the spam, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally. In this case you are using an IP address to send your email that has previously, and is still, sending spam. The IP address is blocked. I'd contact your provider and complain bitterly about it, because it's the provider that is listed, not you specifically."
I send out a newsletter with about 250 subscribers. After talking with SORBS, I contacted Verizon and found out that, even though we signed up for Verizon Business, they limit the amount of email I can send a week to 500 messages. I rarely approach 200 messages and the newsletter is a monthly. Verizon told me I couldnâ(TM)t even send the newsletter in one blast; I had to limit it to 100 subscribers an hour! And in late Fall 2008, some providers, like MS, would reject my mail simply because it had @Verizon.net in the senderâ(TM)s address. I knew I wasn't sending out large amounts of email, let alone spam.
Within those imposed limits, Verizon still could not bring its huge entity to investigate my complaint. In late December, we switch to Constant Contact to email the newsletter. While my boss uses Cox since he works mostly from home, the office is still âoeconnectedâ with Verizon!
Boy, I hate Verizon! Now, maybe they will kill the Zombies from all those dead zones they claim not to have!
=smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
You can set up port 25 SMTP to require authentication for relay purposes, without having to configure end user's machines for another port.
I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...
No, the guy posting before you did that ;-)
Well your spam made it through, but the response must have been throttled since you didn't get first post. You're a Comcast customer, aren't you?
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Indeed.
But if you're the ISP you can just say "Hey customers outgoing port 25 is blocked - use authentication and port 587 to send mail".
In general I'm against ISP blocking services, but in the case of spam prevention its a good choice to make.
(The ideal would be to allow outgoing, but cut people off if they spam. That would punish only the guilty, but I guess they're not so keen on that).
Verizon has been an epic sewer network for years, and has ignored their spam problem for years. If they want to clean up now (or make a lame attempt to clean up, as most telco's do), fine. It just means less work for iptables at my end.
For those who are sick of Verizon's bullshit, here's my list (no promises this is complete, but it should have most of em) of Verizon's ip blocks.
206.46.0.0/16
66.12.0.0/14
207.68.0.0/17
71.96.0.0/11
72.64.0.0/11
72.42.0.0/18
71.160.0.0/15
71.162.0.0/16
96.224.0.0/11
98.108.0.0/14
98.112.0.0/13
68.160.0.0/14
162.84.0.0/16
162.83.0.0/16
151.204.0.0/15
138.88.0.0/21
66.171.0.0/16
66.14.128.0/17
151.201.0.0/16
138.89.0.0/16
141.149.0.0/16
141.150.0.0/15
141.152.0.0/14
141.156.0.0/15
141.158.0.0/16
68.160.192.0/18
68.161.192.0/18
66.14.0.0/17
151.196.0.0/14
151.200.0.0/14
151.204.0.0/15
129.44.0.0/16
138.88.0.0/16
64.222.0.0/15
68.236.0.0/14
70.104.0.0/13
70.16.0.0/13
71.96.0.0/11
209.158.0.0/16
209.159.0.0/19
71.160.0.0/11
173.64.0.0/12
70.192.0.0/11
66.174.0.0/16
75.224.0.0/12
75.240.0.0/13
75.192.0.0/10
97.0.0.0/10
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
In general I'm against monitoring people secretly and continuously; but in the case of cities where children are legally or physically possibly present, it's a good choice to make to stop pedophiles.
... what?
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Yes and it is only a matter of time before that changes and evolves.
The reason these alternative ports and blocking works is because most everyone else isn't doing this. When it comes to the point where most people are doing this, new methods will arise.
The first scenario that comes to mind is that the next generation of bot-ware will listen to your outgoing email traffic and learn your password then configure itself to send email based on that information. Then once again, the problem returns. And if *I* can conceive of this, then I *know* spammers have already thought of this. (I am comfortable in the assumption that I have never come up with an original idea.) You can expect this to occur within the next year or so. The drive to these measures are largely based on the size of the target audience after all. (This is the reason Mac OS X is mostly immune to attacks and infection... it isn't yet a big enough target!)
Things will get crazier before they get better.
I like the suggestion that people are somehow lax in security because their mail client remembers their password. Who are these guys who type the password in every 3 minutes when they check their mail?
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
He's saying that a losing a little bit of liberty to gain some safety isn't worth it. He did this by cleverly rewording the original poster's statement about email to make it about pedophiles to highlight the fact it's essentially the same issue, simply in a different context.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
I herd you like emails in your emails, so I put some traffic thru yo traffic.
In my opinion, the transition to port 587 is nearly pointless. I already use authentication on port 25 to identify customers.
And according to one of the only people I'd trust on SMTP issues, "the SUBMIT specification has several fundamental flaws that make compliance practically impossible. I advise against all use of port 587" -- djb.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Port 587 was allocated by IANA and is documented by the IETF in RFC 2476, and the STARTTLS capability is documented in RFC 2487. It is not clear from the article whether Verizon is going to require STARTTLS or not. They may require STARTTLS for all mail on port 587 if they so choose.
I assume that the "full-on SSL" that you would prefer refers to the non-standard port 465 ("SMTPs"). That port was chosen arbitrarily by Microsoft, has not been standardized by any common standards body, and was previously already allocated to "URL Rendesvous Directory for SSM".
Why perpetuate non-standards when there are established standards which have the same functionality?
I just reread your link. In it DJB explicitly advises against running authentication on port 25. In fact, for security reasons, he wrote two separate programs, qmail-smptd and ofmipd, to keep the tasks of relaying authenticated email and accepting mail for local delivery as removed from one another as possible.
He defends the idea of separating these two tasks, not only to separate ports but separate programs, on this thread on the IETF-SUBMIT mailing list.
So, yeah, his complaint against port 587 was simply that if you can't implement the SUBMIT standard correctly (which according to him noone can), you should use a different port then the one specified in that standard. The rest of the world doesn't care, because it sees all the various authentication methods (including SUBMIT) as extensions to SMTP, and not as a different protocol (OFMIP as DJB calls them collectively), and have no qualms running a standard (non-SUBMIT compliant) SMTP server on port 587.
Port 666 is reserved for Doom (video game)
Wow, I thought AC was joking, but it's right there in RFC1700!
doom 666/tcp doom Id Software
doom 666/tcp doom Id Software
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.