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Giving Your Greytrapping a Helping Hand

Posted by timothy on from the longing-for-more-actual-violence dept.

Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Some spam houses have invested in real mail servers now, meaning that they are able to get past greylisting and even content filtering. Recently Peter Hansteen found himself resorting to active greytrapping to put some spammers in their place. The article also contains a list of spam houses' snail mail addresses in case you want to tour their sites."

4 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. The problem with that is by coryking · · Score: 0, Troll

    You'll turn into SPEWs, or SORBS, or whoever those assholes are.

    Start blacklisting ISP's who rent them servers, and soon enough You'll have blacklisted pretty much half the internet. Most of them are innocent too.

    Vengeance blacklisting is for assholes. I once had a netblock land in SPEW's snare and rather than try to get de-listed, I just emailed the managers and sales people of the company who refused our email. I figured if I went over the power-tripping asshole running the mail server and went to somebody who understood how much legit email they probably losing, maybe the asshole mail dude would get fired.

    Hope he did get fired too. You can blacklist whoever you want in your basement computer, but it is a whole different story when the company you work for starts rejecting corporate mail based on spite-lists like SPEWs or whatever you are suggesting.

    1. Re:The problem with that is by coryking · · Score: 1, Troll

      Okay. Fair enough. There are exceptions.

      I'm bitter because the now defunct SWEWs were overzealous assholes who cast a giant net. Our tiny /26 got caught when our upstreams /16 got blocked for whatever reason. We only had a couple clients get their shit rejected--and in those cases our client knew the recipients personally, I just had them call the recipient to inform them they had an idiot running their mail server.

      The people using things like SPEWs to block mail traffic were not thinking like you are. They are either hoping for a quick fix or are on some kind of vigilante mission. The former can be educated by letting them know how much legit shit they've blocked. The latter are hopeless and as I said a few times, it is easier to let the higher-ups know what the deal is.

      If you've got the stats to back it up, that is a whole different ball of wax. If I was in your list, I probably has doing some serious shit. I do the same thing only with comment spammers that have IPs of open proxies. As long as you have the metrics to back things up in the off-chance you do block a little legit traffic, life is cool. But you gotta have the metrics, which means you gotta thing. People who use spite-lists aren't thinking, and that is the problem.

  2. Thats fine with me by coryking · · Score: 0, Troll

    Cause I'll just email your manager and the sales guy who didn't get my customers email and hopefully you'll be fired.

    Playing email games like that with your own personal mail server is fine. Doing it on a corporate network isn't. And nothing makes me more happy then sicking pissed off sales guys and managers in your company after you. It is far easier to get your manager or sales staff to force you to remove that blacklist then it is to deal with with the assholes like you or the guys running the RBL. The only legit RBL's are places like Spamhaus who have automated ways to remove yourself from their automated list. I have no problems with those lists because botnets will not remove themselves from the list, but legit people just follow the link in the bounce and are removed immediately. Anything else, I try to get assholes who use the list fired from their company.

    1. Re:Thats fine with me by coryking · · Score: 0, Troll

      Except you'd be wrong because we aren't spammers and dont have any on our network. "You" are just an overzealous sysadmin who blocked legit email that was meant for your sales staff.