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Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Anti-Spam Service Extortion?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a European ISP, and lately we're receiving quite a few complaints from customers about not being able to send emails because of UCEProtect's listings. After checking with their site, we found out that our whole AS (!) was blacklisted. Their 'immediate removal policy' asks for money, around 90 euros Per IP for end users and 300 euros for ISPs, and their site has bold statements like
'YOU ARE LOSING YOUR RIGHT TO EXPRESSDELIST YOUR IP IF YOU ARE STUPID AND CLAIMING THIS WOULD BE BLACKMAIL...'
Could this be considered extortion-blackmail ? Has anyone else on Slashdot dealt with this service before?"
post
I always go along and pay. Yes, I'm as yellow as they come. I completely shiver just thinking about it.
Now where are my porn links...
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Good grief, who in the heck still uses e-mail blacklists in an actual production environment? Those outlived their usefulness over a decade ago. Way too many false positives, and this shows the sort of problems you can encounter when one blacklist decides extortion is fun. There are far better ways to filter for spam.
Well you got enough guns over there use them and take em out that is what you seem to like doing as a pass time shoot people because you can ..
In the US, I'd say what they're doing is restraint of trade. It's kinda like what Yelp does here. People list a business or service. It cost extra to remove negative reports. I avoid them.
While you may not have the resources to deal with these assholes long term, maybe the lawyer will say "litegate" or they may just say "Pay the extortion".
Or you could just find the principles involved and do an Anonymous disclosure on them. Maybe they don't want a bullseye painted on their foreheads or their cars or where their kids go to school. I like this strategy for the Westboro Community Church but you'll have to evaluate if it's OK for these asshats.
I'm a receiver, I use UCEProtect to score emails, they help to block a LOT of recent and bleeding edge spam. I don't have to pay them anything for their assistance.
Adding an IP address to their whitelist is no easy thing. You see, they hire only blind, deaf quadriplegics, so each octet is entered in binary through a mouth open/close morse code interface. But that's only after your request makes it through the queue to be read through tactile forehead tapping tty... Perfectly understandable that these folks detest spam, isn't it?
blackmail [blak-meyl]
noun
1. any payment extorted by intimidation, as by threats of injurious revelations or accusations.
2. the extortion of such payment: He confessed rather than suffer the dishonor of blackmail.
3. a tribute formerly exacted in the north of England and in Scotland by freebooting chiefs for protection from pillage. verb (used with object)
4. to extort money from (a person) by the use of threats.
5. to force or coerce into a particular action, statement, etc
blackmailer, noun
blackmail (blækmel)
1. the act of attempting to obtain money by intimidation, as by threats to disclose discreditable information
2. the exertion of pressure or threats, esp unfairly, in an attempt to influence someone's actions
3. to exact or attempt to exact (money or anything of value) from (a person) by threats or intimidation; extort
4. to attempt to influence the actions of (a person), esp by unfair pressure or threats
Ask your company's legal team about options, such as suing in the UK for defamation.
Just a thought.
How about sending a bunch of spam from a laptop at an open Wifi like Starbucks, where the spam is promoting UCEprotect.org. Send it to/through Gmail and other blacklist organizations. The goal being to get them placed on a spam blacklist...
Either seems preferable to spending 300 Euros for an express de-list. Then, doing it again, etc.
Make sure you monitor out-going email through your ISP's servers so that no spam is being sent by your customers.
Maybe it's the language barrier, but that seems like a lot of smiley faces and profanity for a professional organization.
Their revenue model seems odd as well - it's almost like they're set up just to extract money from senders.
My instinct is don't pay them, figure out why you got listed, and stop whatever triggered the listing.
If the customers are complaining excessively, consider the unblock fee - once. Definitely terminate the accounts of the spammers.
You find that when you start turning up spam solutions to high levels, a lot of legit shit gets filtered.
I mean if all you care about is blocking spam, I can give you a 100% solution: Just block "." as in the root of all DNS. No more spam, ever. Of course it also will have a massive false positive rate, you won't get any e-mail at all.
If a spam service just takes the "Block all of the things!" attitude it really isn't that useful overall.
They're almost certainly not paying royalties to Paramount for the use of the Borg-9 font in their logo.
It would be helpful to know what abuse your users are supposed to have committed that resulted in the blacklisting. If you're allowing spammers to operate freely, you should be subject to much greater penalty than 300 euros.
Firstly, as Pamela Jones over at Groklaw would tell you in a heartbeat, convince someone at your company to take legal advice. If your company is contemplating action of any kind in response to what has happened, it is critically important that you understand that your intended steps will not undermine you at some later date. Only a legal professional can tell you that. So please, get proper legal advice.
Secondly, thinking about the relationship between yourself and the party you believe to be performing the blocking/spam filtering. Is the issue between your company and the third party, or your *clients* and the third party? I can understand that you are coming under fire from your clients, but please refer back to the first point, above.
Third, go get familiar with the relevant legal frameworks. Your legal support, when you hire, them, is going to start asking legal questions. You understand the tech, but take the time to familiarise yourself with the law. Start with: RIPA (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers, which, IIRC, makes it illegal to intercept any communication between two parties), PEC (the Privacy in Electronic Communications Act [2003]), and take a quick look at the DPA (Data Protection Act [1998]) inasmuch as the data being generated and acted upon by the third party [email addresses] was created for the express purpose of *routing email traffic*, not *filtering* email traffic. There may be an argument that the filtering is inappropriate. See how a lawyer (I'm not one) can help you here???
Fourth, are there any professional trade bodies or organisations that both your company and the third party subscribe to (i.e. a UK Association of ISPs) that may have a dispute handling process? Are the two parties able to sit down with an arbitrator? If so, this might be a free service that you could try?
Fifth, if all of the above fail, then use of the Internet in the UK is regulated by various Government departments and Quango Regulators, such as the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office) and Ofcom (the Communications Watchdog). As above if you have taken proper legal advice from a law firm with expertise in this area, they should advise you on the best method of engagement.
I understand that you want to help your clients, but in this case it's critically important that any steps you take don't make it worse. Legal advice must be step 1.
Hope this helps...
It tells you plainly how to get delisted for free. But that requires you to do some serious work and find out who you have spamming on your network. Regardless of the legitimacy of the supposed spam, you need to find out who it is sending it and make them stop.
The 7 day waiting period once it stops sucks. But that's their policy if you want it removed for free. Free removal = you stopping the spammer on your network.
Now, if you want to get it removed **faster** than 7 days plus however long it takes you to get the spammer to knock it off, then you have to pay. And in neither case is it guaranteed you will not end up back on the blacklist if someone starts spamming on your network again.
Its not blackmail, its a convenience fee. I'm sure your ISP charges your users some of those for things like getting network techs on site faster and such.
There is not such thing needed as Anti-Spam, just setup greylist with whitelisting and your set.
If you end up there check why and wait 7 days.
Obviously anyone giving you legal advice has failed due diligence. From their site: "Every IP listed will expire 7 days after the LAST abuse is detected, and FREE of charge."
So, find out whoever is spamming, and put a stop to it. It might be different if your ASN is listed, but I'd still be looking for spam sources on your own network.
NEVER trust an AC. The TRUTH is RIGHT there on the linked page
FREE OF CHARGE REMOVAL:
There is no need for you to request removal, if you do not want to pay.
Every IP address temporary listed as Level 1 expires automatically 7 days after the last spam email from it hits our SPAMTRAPS. This means your IP address will be removed, lesson learned, no more spam from your computer.
The FREE option is listed FIRST, you ONLY need to pay if you want someone to manually check your SPAM sending IP can be cleared. Spammers LIE, they will abuse ANY complaint system and this costs time and energy.
Spammers rely on the low costs of their operation to remain profitable, they spend nothing and instead leech from others people infrastructure, efforts and time to make their money. The easiest way to combat this is to cost the Spammers time, energy and money. That hurts their profits the most and is the only way to hinder them.
Yes it sucks to hell and back if you are caught in between with your "legit" reasons to run a mass emailer from your own computer. But the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. Don't like it? You PAY ME then to deal with spam. You don't want to pay? Well... then what do you want? Email was ruined by the spammers, the old idea of anyone being able to mail anyone else is GONE thanks to them. You fix the spammers then because I am NOT going back to the days when 99% of email hitting my systems was spam.
Frankly there are so many alternatives to sending mass mail from your own system, only highly suspicious people want to go around this. And yes, loss of freedom for one means loss of freedom for all... but the costs associated with combatting spam all on your own are just to big. Installing a DNS blacklist is a cheap reliable option and the number of people hurt by it are statistical rounding errors. Really, nobody I know still uses their own email system but instead uses something like gmail with their own domain name. I use Amazon. And gosh, it just works.
Basically, it all comes down who has to spend time and effort. The recipient or the mailer. Do YOU have to make sure as a sender that your system can send to everyone OR does the recipient have to make sure that he can receive from everyone?
The recipient is the person with the least interest here in case of spam AND indeed in regular emails. If some entity wants to mail me from some home IP in black listed range. What is my motivation in wanting to receive said message? The spammer/sender is the one who needs the message to be received.
AND ALL THIS BLACKLIST REQUIRES: Is that AFTER your system has been caught sending spam, it stops sending spam for 7 days. That is all. Just 7 days without spam. The AC whiner clearly is running a system that sends endless spam. He needs to deal with that and NOT demand the entire rest of the world open their system to his spammy criminal customers.
When you sign up for Amazon EMS there are several security measures in place to avoid you using their systems to send spam. That is because Amazon and other email providers spend a LOT of money making sure their IP range remains unblocked and they do this by having people actively making sure no spam is send through their system.
Is it that difficult to ask that an ISP does the same?
Again yes it sucks if you are caught in between but hey, there are alternatives and YOU are FREE to come up with a better system. In the meantime, I take my DNS blacklist thank you very much and not shed a tear about your home mail setup. Hey, at least it is better then in the old days when many including me would just black list entire regions of the world. Still do for that matter, you would be suprised how much less attempts at hacking you get on a small webserver if you just block Africa, Asia, Middle Eaast, East-block, South-America etc etc. But you might get a legit visitor from those regions! For a local amateur soccer club home page?
My time is money,
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The guy posts the question as an AC. Why? That is a MAJOR red flag.
Secondly, no consumer ISP would tolerate such a question being asked on a public forum, they have lawyers in house to deal with this kind of stuff, they do NOT Ask Slashdot. Never. No way, no how.
10 to 1 that this is some east European with a couple of servers at a hosting party who hires them out to spammers and now finds his leased servers are useless to those same spammers because his IP range has been blocked and he wants them unbanned to he can continue to rent out his servers to spammers.
DNS block lists do on occasion hurt real newsletters. But this is about a legit newsletter, why is not mentioned? If this is a legit service that is being hurt, why is not mentioned. If it is a legit ISP that is being hurt, why is it not named?
Could it be that this question is posted by an AC with not even a hint about the nature of the hurt party being the very generic label "ISP" is that even the simplest google research would reveal that the ISP in question is a spam haven?
Anyway, a DNS list is just a list of numbers. It is a fact list that does nothing unless someone ELSE uses that list. Listing ip's on a list cannot be illegal and block mail from MY server is perfectly legal as well.
Spammers have tried fighting DNS lists for years now and failed. This question should never even have been asked.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As posted elsewhere in this thread, 10 to 1 this is a spam haven ISP. How can he terminate his only customers? Some east block kid thought he could make some fast money renting out a small IP range to spammers, then found it became useless once it got blocked and now he is butthurt the world doesn't allow his get quick rich scheme. Proof me wrong, get the coward to name the company in question. He can't since it would instantly reveal it for what it is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They look quite unserious on their support pages. And im suprised some goverments is using them but they might be successfull since they apparentely block whole AS series....
Godaddy did a similar thing some years ago. They blocked the/24 net if they recived spam.
problem was that they required us as customer of an isp to "stop" the offending ip even if it was not
under our control...Since back then i was just the sysadmin of a customer with only few ip numbers.
Anyway call your lawyer first. But they will probably say it is not illegal to use shitty services..Depending on your local country laws.
Put up a big notice in simple language to your customers about what a blacklist is and it is mostly out of your controll.
You could start to block outgoing port 25 and force all to go via a forwarder. But make sure
it works or hire another company that know how to run mailservers 24/7 with high loads and block spam before they go
out on the net.
Hi,
even those guys from uce-list have honorable goals I think their way of trying of achiving a spam free internet it will hurt the ecosystem of the internet itself.
And especially one aspect "freedom". I distaste spam as many like you being nagged by "Luke" or "Mr. Motumba" with their ideas of marketing, I thought that blacklisting might be a good way to prevent spam, but lately being affected by yahoo & aol filtering out emails sent to people that I know in person(arround 12 per month to the same person), the emails aren't marked as spam, they just don't reach their destined recipient, they just vanish.
Also the behaviour of putting internal communication into public and stating that german law does not apply to them because they are not operating from germany is wrong and is a lie. On their page they state that "bavarian people" make up these lists. Those guys are behaving like outlaws, like those spammers they fight.
But I don't get it like many others here in /. why not using fingerprinting of those messages and statistical methods to identify spam.
I skimmed their policy pages and it looks like they do remove automatically and free of charge. IF the ISP cleans up their network and makes the spam sending boxes shut up.
1 - Are they relevant to your operation? If not, ignore.
2 - Are these guys for real? You could just be looking at a scam.
3 - Do you actually HAVE a spam problem? Worth checking anyway. If you're an ISP, all you need is a couple of infected customers and you may end up getting blocked by more than just this outfit (a tactic I disagree with, but I appreciate the sentiment).
I cleaned up an ISP in Hong Kong who had a spam problem, and the size of the problem was really too much for identifying affected clients - we'd be playing whack-a-mole for months. We closed the outbound router for email exit traffic and installed a gateway that did some extra checking. It was then relatively easy to ping back warnings to customers from there that they were having a possible virus infection (it also served as a heads up to those who were spamming for real that the game was up).
How about blocking port 25 for residential customers and dynamic IP's ? In some countries this is already mandatory. ...
Using RBLs is so last decade
It looks more like UCEProtect is declaring to its customers that you are a spam haven and that they should not be accepting any mail from your systems. That sounds more they are libeling/slandering you. I am not a lawyer but I imagine an imaginative legal team would be able to sue UCEProtect in that way.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
If you run an ISP and use dynamic address allocation, chances are that a low percentage of your users is infected and they appear to be coming from your entire address pool. This will mean that in practice, your entire AS will be blacklisted permanently.
The way it often is solved, is that the abuse department for the ISP sets up a "custom" communications protocol with the blacklist operators. In that protocol, it's usually described how the blacklister deals with IPs (only block individuals, block for $lease_period) and that the ISP will get abuse mail for each of those offending IPs. In return, the ISP will have to take measures to pull the offending machine/customer offline in a very short timeframe, usually well within 24 hrs after the abuse mail has been sent. Often ISPs will have some sort of mechanism that will re-route the customers sending spam into a walled garden environment, in which they can only send mail via the outgoing mail servers of the ISP and not browse the web, apart from web sites of the ISP themselves and anti-virus and update websites and such.
This is by no means a perfect solution, since you are automatically tossing customers in a non net-neutrality setup because some third party triggered your abuse system. However, when configured and tweaked correctly, you get less than 3% false positives and your customers generally appreciate what you do. If you deal openly and swiftly with the false positives, even those tend to agree with your policy, but you have to make sure that you help them quickly and take the blame.
If you have a setup like this working in your environment, getting a "custom" deal with the blacklist admins usually isn't that hard, but you have to take the initiative and prove to them that you do anything reasonably within your power to take care of spammers and zombies, before they will cut you some slack.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Stop sending spam, wait 7 days and your good. Your at level 3 your AS has been spewing spam for awhile and you have done NOTHING to fix it. As an ISP you should be checking all your IPs against all major spam lists and proactively dealing with spam. This will probably mean loosing customers. Some things to consider it's trivial to setup a relay server for your own mail servers outside your AS to keep outbound email going. Look into some technical means like transparent outbound spam filters, outbound port 25 syn rate limiting, or a plethora of other aids. Those clients will all claim it's triple opt in super secret they have everybody's dna on file, they are lies. Remember that spammers are at worst criminals at best have absolutely no morals in either event they have no compunction lying to you. Strengthen your TOS put BIG fines in there for repeated spamming wave them based on your gut and history. Often you need something to push legit companies to fix there issues.
All thing considered getting to l3 means your just ignoring the spam coming from your network. You need to get proactive and fix the root issue of spam spewing from your network. There are plenty of technical methods to avoid the 7 days block that are far cheaper then paying them. At the end of the day spend less energy railing about "blackmail" and more policing your network. If you do not, your facing the internet death penalty and the business needs to go under this is the internet working as intended.
No sir I dont like it.
I'd echo the "NEVER trust and AC" post by SmallFurryCreature (593017). I'd further consider the scenario where a few computers or the entire network being compromised. Botnets have been around for a while and are a growing problem. It is possible for individual customers or even ISP owned machines to be infected by botnets that send out spam email in bulk quantities. You may not necessarily have the legal ability to monitor the traffic due to privacy laws. Perhaps you can setup a honeypot of your own or work with people that operate them to figure out which machines are sending out the spam. Does the ISP assign IPs in a dynamic manner? If so the problem may appear larger than it really is to an external viewer. Altering how much IPs change could maybe help as well.
I've had to deal with UCEProtect in my job as a system administrator. Whenever we got listed it was because their spambots (that send mail coming from the droppatrol.de domain) managed to get a bounce out of our system. We allow our users to forward mail offsite and some do to sites that are far far less permissive then us, and when that happens we properly send the bounce.
I would say that running spam bots, and then asking someone to pay to get off a blacklist that their spambots got you onto, is effectively organized crime type extortion.
In my opinion any respectable ISP should nowadays block port 25/TCP in the residential blocks to protect it is own customers from being blacklisted, as there are know and better alternatives. Further more, the email servers should run in separate addresses, or better yet, in a different net block. Alas, spammers and configuring it has gotten so time intensive, that in the long run, it gets cheaper to outsource to google. (many people is not aware they still can keep their domain). You can always also do transparent routing in the 25/TCP and filter it through a spam appliance/email server. Block yourself the repeat offenders. Warn the customers. (as I said previously, blocking 25 altogether seems a nicer idea). I would finish saying port 25/SPAM is more a political than a technical problem, however if you dont act on it, it is not of use posting rants as articles in facebook.
I used to run the AHBL (for those wondering, I am Andrew Kirch)
I've never heard of it, and never heard of you.
I run hundreds of mail servers, and you find some of my code in both fetchmail and exim.
Here on my ISP we get the same problem from time to time. We have a very strong antispam policy regarding our own users (about 40k) and they usually understand it. Our main problem right now are hijacked user accounts. So we have systems in place the blocks users/passwords after they start sending spam, but only after a few hundred were already sent (we are improving on that shortly). While this has led to a much lower RBL block rate, we still get one from time to time. In that case we remove that mail server from our cluster for a week. You only get ASN blocked if there are too many IPs sending spams on your network. There is no other way: watch your users, specially the web hosting users (PHP's mail() should be deactivated). RBLs works on the premise that they should block any spam regardless of any other traffic you might have. Reputation systems knows better. In any case, no one will like your network as long as your users keep sending spams. Your only complaint about UCE is because they charge to unblock your IP. The others don't charge and will just not unblock it.
There is a reason you are listed:
* You have spam originating from your system for too long of a time.
* You are unresponsive to reports.
So, your entire network range is listed. Everyone is bouncing emails. Everyone is complaining to you, and you've noticed. You've been forwarded the site, and you're contemplating just paying them off... except that it just won't work. You'll be relisted again, and with reason -- someone on your network spammed and nobody's listening.
Thus:
* If you haven't done so, open up abuse@ and point it to somebody with the power to diagnose, disable, and close accounts.
* If the guy behind abuse@ doesn't have said above power, GIVE IT TO HIM.
* If the guy behind abuse@ does, but doesn't use it, FIRE HIM.
* If you haven't done so, disable outbound port 25 at your border router with the exception of an out-bound SMTP server.
* Put an outbound spam filter in place.
If you are unwilling to do the above, then there is one last thing you will eventually do: CLOSE SHOP.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
1) Determine why you are listed
2) Change your infrastructure to avoid that in the future (port 587, auth, etc)
3) Be patient, watch it work
none
This is a direct violation of net neutrality laws, at least in the Netherlands. You could take them to court if you live there.
All ISPs should block them
Those clients will all claim it's triple opt in super secret they have everybody's dna on file, they are lies. Remember that spammers are at worst criminals at best have absolutely no morals in either event they have no compunction lying to you. Strengthen your TOS put BIG fines in there for repeated spamming wave them based on your gut and history. Often you need something to push legit companies to fix there issues.
So, find out whoever is spamming, and put a stop to it. It might be different if your ASN is listed, but I'd still be looking for spam sources on your own network.
double sided tape, masking tape, packing tape
Years ago I was running an email server, (Very low output 3 to 5 users personal email only, no lists) and we had some inbound addresses that were overloaded with spam, so we abandoned them. But rather than just discarding email sent to those addresses ( for fear that someone didn't get the new address) I set them up so (via a piped script in the aliases file ) to fail on receipt with the message "your message to abandoned@email can not be delivered, please use the webform here to send your message"
/dev/null. second, I didn't actually send the email, but we got blacklisted simply because our IP adress was in the chain of Received headers in the email header.
So we got blacklisted, and checking the logs we had *NO* outgoing email at the time of the accursed spam message(s). The blacklist service didn't give me the whole message, but it contained enough for me to find reference to it in my log.
Near as I can figure, some spammer sent email to us through an open relay, using a honeypot (you get classed as a spammer if you send email to this address ) as his spoofed 'from: address'. My mailer refused to accept the email to the abandoned address, so the relay returned the 'undelivered' message to the honeypot address.
Now I had several problems with this. First, to avoid blacklisting, I had to remove this helpful service. Now those messages go to
More recently, I had newsletter messages sent to a members of a private club bounced by their local ISP. The sending IP address was not listed in any blacklist I could find. The ISP was just refusing connection, No message, nothing. (I could send email to that ISP from other services like gmail) They wouldn't take my call ( I'm not their customer) so I had some of their customers call and ask "Why am I not getting these newsletter messages?" . I wasn't on the call, but it sounded like they just played dumb. A few of the list members gave us non-local-isp addresses (gmail , yahoo) and now they get the newsletter there.
Again, legitimate email loses out.
And finally, Just about every time, my "password reset" messages end up in people's spam folder. This is one of my most common support calls. (this even after the page where they request the password reset says right on it "check your spam folder" ) There are lots of false positives on spam.
I manage several exchange servers and use Postini with outbound filtering configured mainly to avoid any blacklist problems. If the pricing is a problem you can purchase a single user for filtering and set Non-Account Bouncing to Off and all incoming mail will get delivered to your server while all outbound messages go through Postini's servers.
As long as you confirm thricely that the targets of your spam are willing to receive it you should be good. I'd suggest meeting each and everyone of your in person and with verified live human witnesses present to attest that your prey is willing to subjected to the advertising that you are want to force upon him.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You really have to enjoy some of the comments in this thread, especially those saying things like:
- "Just wait 7 days with sending no spam!"
- "ISPs should be proactively taking care of this!"
The majority of these spammers are not some Eastern European criminal mastermind with spam servers; they are your grandma's PC which has been turned into a bot. Guess what? Grandma's computer is sending out spam in the background as fast as her system and connection limits will allow. When one of those hits a honeypot, you get RBL'd. If this isn't found and detected by the ISP (who likely has tens of thousands of endpoints, minimum), all of the sudden their network is now L3 (or something) and has to be paid for the "privileged" of delisting. Meanwhile, while the "just wait a week" crowd is off enjoying themselves, anyone on the network is no not able to send email to anyone using this RBL for at least a week. Think most customers (especially any sort of a business) will find this delay acceptable?
These lists are extortion, pure and simple.
I've seen this story several times before with people complaining about "blackmail" with different blacklists and filters, and in all cases I have ever seen there has been some sort of real problem. Remember that there are different levels of blacklisting, from the lowly backscatter blacklisting which hits a lot of legitimate organisations, up to Level 3 (which indicates that you've been informed of a problem for a long time but basically don't give a fuck), up to the next step which is de-peering or permanent widespread blacklisting. OP is clearly drinking in the last-chance saloon on this one.
Top tip: running an ISP is harder than it looks. Not managing abuse of your systems will eventually cause major problems, and in the worst cases will drive you out of business and have law enforcement forcing their way into you server rooms to take your kit. Don't assume that YOU are the innocent party and the the complainers are just making it up if you want to remain in the ISP business..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Then tell them it will cost to have it stopped, followed by a posting on your site saying, 'You Are Losing Your Ability To Do Business If You Are Stupid And Claiming This Would Be Blackmail."
Bark less. Wag more.
The only difference here is that it's accepted. All the big email carriers use the spamhaus block list. ALL cable modem IP blocks area already on the block list and you cannot get them removed. Therefore, to send mail, you MUST pay someone or use their "free" service where they can monitor your email and feed you ads.
My guess is they, in collaboration with the US government, set it up this way on purpose because it benefits both of them.
When customers contact us because they can't receive certain mail, we try to whitelist the IP(s).
When customers complain that they can't send mail to a certain person because our IPs are blacklisted, we ask them to ask their recipients to have our ranges whitelisted. It's almost the only way this is going to work. No point in trying to have someone whitelist our range over the phone in a company with several layers of managers between a helpdesk-agent and a server-operator.
We don't host any spammers, but sometimes accounts get hijacked and spam does get sent from our IPs. When we find out, we stop it.
But still, blacklistings do happen.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
The UK is part of the European Union, and one of its countries shares an island with a eurozone member.
In the EU (and probably elsewhere too) there are VERY compelling reasons to do so.
So use encryption. While you lose the ability to perform server based searches your email content remains secure and you don't have the hassle of running your own SMTP server.
It's freedom of speech.
If UCEProtect has an email they think is spam they are perfectly within their rights to proclaim said email is spam from the tops of the highest mountains. Other people have the right to either listen to them (and block the OP), or ignore them (and not block the OP). They do not have to be real nice to the alleged spammer and spend thousands of man-hours a year on appeals. It would be nice of them if they did, but their is no legal requirement to be nice to people.
"Frankly there are so many alternatives to sending mass mail from your own system, only highly suspicious people want to go around this."
I am a journalist, and I know what the laws are around email, subpoenas, (lack of any) protections under the (US) law, and the cost of lawsuits. I keep my own server, on my own premises, and keep logs only long enough for diagnostic purposes. All email is deleted after 2 weeks unless it is specifically moved to a location meant to be saved for the same reasons. I have been doing this, or parts of it, since before my ISP offered mail services, over 20 years now FWIW. Some people call me paranoid, I point to things like MegaUpload and call them ignorant. I guess that I would be considered "highly suspicious" according to many government agencies.
So there you go, there is at least one good reason to do the above, although I rarely send out mass mailings, probably less than one a year.
As for the rest of your points, I totally agree. Thanks for trying to stop the spam.
-Charlie
Actually it's more like a car dealership, where one customer is alleged by a private company to have driven their new car illegally, now all customers of that dealership have been banned from driving in any town that uses the "bad driver" list, for 7 days unless the dealer pays a fee on their behalf.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
A while back our IP address was getting blacklisted for spam. So I started trapping info on recipient addresses for emails being sent outside the organization. I began to see a pattern. every few months there would be a burst of spam emails -- maybe a few hundred -- that lasted a few hours and then stopped. I traced the sending IP address to an ISP in the Virgin Islands or Bahamas. I then knew the spam was not coming from our organization. So that meant that an account in our organization had a password compromised. And that account was being used to log in to SMTP and relay spam
But eventually everyone's password should be changed and the spam should disappear. Only it didn't. Further investigation showed that there was an account named 'test' that did not require a periodic password change. Test did not have permissions for anything. It was defined as a guest and couldn't even print. But apparently it could use our SMTP server as a relay. It also had a dictionary word as a password. I figured a bot could be trying various id/password combos and occasionally hit on a working combo, sending a burst of spam. And that whoever was controlling the bot was too lazy to pay attention when it actually found an id/pw combo that worked.
Removing that account stopped the spam.
My takeaway was that even IDs with no apparent privileges can bite you. That IDs with simple names like test are bad. And that using dictionary word passwords even for testing purposes is bad.
sometimes I also have the feeling that these services are somewhat extortionist. I find this to be the case when they really don't help you in any way to track down the spam they think you're sending.
some of these are helpful and provide sample spam e-mails that they caught. usually the message ID is enough for me to track down the spam and spammer in question.
why such an organization would actually _not help_ fighting spam in this way is beyond me though.
We've had several such extortion attempts and on the last occasion, we found that they are using domains that were previously held by e-mail providers as "spam honeypots". We've had such e-mail addresses in our forum users database since 2003 and now every time we sent them a forum notification, we got blacklisted by the extortionists (who by the way refuse to tell you which e-mail address caused the blacklisting). So in my opinion, they are trying very hard to get people blacklisted for legitimate uses of e-mail addresses in order to blackmail then.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
* you do not get any notifications if you are blacklisted, except whatever obscure message is in your logs
* you do not have to have spam originating from your system, it can be perfectly normal e-mail to an address used by someone you knew in the past, that is now used by someone else as a spam honeypot.
UCEprotect sucks. It's no wonder the people behind it are hiding their identities.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
For traditional reasons dating back to the dial-up UUCP era, most email systems are store and forward. That's really no longer necessary. In an "always-on" era, mail should be synchronous. When an SMTP server receives a mail that it needs to forward (presumably only to a known address) it should, while holding the incoming connection open, send the appropriate outgoing mail. If the outgoing send succeeds, the SMTP server should reply to the its client with success. If not, it replies with a failure code. No "bounce" messages are ever sent. So there's no possibility of sending a "bounce" message to a faked address. "Joe jobs" become completely ineffective.
Any non-success status from the outgoing send gets passed back to the incoming connection. If the destination server is down, the SMTP 450 status (Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable) should be returned. For 4xx statuses, most mailers will resend, so the first mailer in the chain will handle retransmission. If the first mailer is a user SMTP client (rare today), the person sending will get an immediate fail, indicating that the mail was not received.
A simplified SMTP server like that would be appropriate for machines that only handle mail as a sideline and forward it somewhere else, like most web servers.
From http://www.uceprotect.org/cart00neys/2011-001.html , the requested fee is to be paid monthly.
Since you already have dealing with this company it is not spam, it is communication and corporate extortion is not blackmail it is "the cost of doing business" I doubt there is much you can do.
And all they do is maintain a list, so they can't "block" you. You get blocked because people use their list because they like it.
I would be more worried about how you got on the list than how to get off. (lest you get back on right away even after getting de-listed).
I can't blame them too much for charging, since spammers pull all kinds of dirty tricks and spend money on lawsuits, etc. to get rid of spam fighters.
But.........
When they use a word like "stupid" in all caps as an official part of their web site, I wouldn't bother to even deal with them, regardless of what gets blocked. You know their maturity level already.
You should be more careful about how you use the following words: your/you're, losing/loosing, waive/wave, there/their.
Also, your writing would be easier to understand if you added commas, colons, and semicolons.
The content of your writing is useful, but I think many readers would be distracted to some degree by your misuse of basic words.
By choosing appropriate words, you make it easier for people to interpret your writing.
The interpretation of your comment is not ambiguous, despite the misuse of words. In principle, you could have eliminated most vowels from your writing without losing essential meaning, too. But there's communication, and then there's *efficient* communication.
Your problem is likely to be your customers running bots.
Clean your best strategy is to clean them up, they are bad customers for an isp any way, expensive to support and heavy band width users.
IMHO is they can't keep their computer clean it is their own fault, we don't let incompetent drivers on the road and we shouldn't allow incompetent users on the net either.
Just look here (nice megalomaniac style threats) and here (how mature, with the writing style of a 14 years old script kiddie). Do you trust these people to deal with spam in a professional manner? I know I don't, because I've had to deal with the results of their "work" before. They simply don't care if they cause damage, they probably even enjoy it, otherwise they would try to screw up less often.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Let me give you an easy way to battle this organization. They claim to be based in Germany, yet their web site lacks lacks vital information required by German telecommunications law. Specifically, the imprint (Impressum) and a site owner address that is court-servable. And yes, their German-langugage site lacks this information as well.
This leads me to two conclusions:
a) This is either not a German company or a very stupid German company. There's a whole industry of Law firms specialized in serving cease-and-desist letters to web sites which don't obey telco law in Germany (And in the process asking for a healthy fee for their services, something German law permits them to do).
b) You have a very good handle to get them dragged before a German court because of that alone. Ask a lawyer experienced in German telecommunications law about a missing imprint and address on a Germany-based web site and watch their eyes light up with glee...
Point b) would be something you might wanna look into if you want to hit back against them. Find a lawyer who knows about this kind of stuff and ask them about it. They might even be able to do it for free to you because they can bill their fees in full to the web site the served the letter to as far as I know.
Reading their web pages in both English and German also leads me to the conclusion that they are either fighting a holy war against spam, not caring about any casualties they leave in their wake, or are out to squeeze money out of people. I'm basing this on how the language and verbiage on their web site sounds, compared to known-legit business websites. Either way, it's probably a good idea to be weary and look into options against them.
most of the general commenters avoid to reply the specific case. there are great rbl's and some really bad ones. uceprotect is special. it is run by a really arrogant asshole who is (or was at given points of time) banned from most civilised anti-spam groups due to his, erm, business oriented approach. enlist fast and delist slow, so most of his lists are simply junk and must not be used. only few mismanaged sites use them for straightforward blocking and they should be educated. oh, and NEVER pay, you will be relisted in moments for one bad email even if your system stopped a few hundred thousand spam. i am rbl operator myself, but I expire all records fast, and removal is possible.
use uceprotect for spam scoring if you insist with low-low scores... never for reject. btw only a *few* rbl's are good for straightforward rejection, but these junks are not of those.
My personal, low traffic mail server got hacked recently and started spamming like there was no tomorrow. I ended up on most blacklists including UCE protect.
I cleaned up my crap, used the 'request removal' link where it was available and simply ignored UCE protect. Guess what? I'm not on there any more... with me doing nothing except cleaning up the spam source.
The conclusions are left up to the reader.
Hint, he works for a European ISP, and UCEprotect is German. US laws don't particularly apply.
There are spam filter services that are traditionally very conservative - for many years you could trust Spamhaus not to cause false positives. There have been other spam filter services that were very aggressive, entirely non-responsive (even when Michelle wasn't busy), and impossible to get off of, and no inbound mail server admin with any sense would use them as more than a SpamAssassin weighting factor.
If UCEprotect is taking the overkill route, you'll need to contact the mail systems that are using their services about how to do so appropriately, in addition to potentially using whatever legal remedies are available. (If you were in the UK, for instance, libel law might be a useful tool, but I'm not a lawyer, much less an EU or DE lawyer.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know UCEprotect, but they're hardly the first RBL to be aggressive about putting people on their list, hard to get off even for false positives, and very hard to get off of quickly.
Even if they are legitimate, if they're not responsive or competent, you could find them blacklisting you (as a mail sender), or blacklisting people you want to receive email from (if you're a mail receiver). If you're running a good mail receiving service, you should only block on lists that are very careful about not reporting false positives - other lists can be very useful SpamAssassin weights or greylist triggers, but you can't trust them for simple blocking.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If their business objective is to rake in extortion money by charging mail senders not to be blacklisted, that's a scam.
If their business objective is to provide a correct classification of email, so mail receivers can trust them to provide good advice about what email is spam, but they generate way too many false positives because their methodology is inadequate, that's not a scam, it's just incompetence.
This is the first I've heard of them, so I've got no informed opinion about whether they're honest or scammers, or whether they're competent or incompetent, but if you don't have very good reasons to trust their competence, you shouldn't use their lists as a hard filter - use them to trigger greylisting, or use them as a SpamAssassin weight, and see how well they work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
European ISP, German blocklist publisher - US laws don't apply here. But yes, get legal advice first.
And there are times that life is just going to be difficult - one friend of mine actually is a pharmacist in Canada (:-), and friends of mine have a human rights organization that actually does sometimes want to receive email from Nigeria that at least talks about corrupt officials, even though they're not usually trying to smuggle money out of the country.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Any respectable ISP should never block inbound tcp/25, and shouldn't block outbound tcp/25 for people who want to use it. In practice, of course, 99.99% of outbound residential port 25 traffic is spam from infected machines, so it's good to make blocking the default behaviour for users who don't ask you to turn it off, but the primary reason for using an ISP smart mail server for your outbound email is also long obsolete, since most people have full-time internet connections instead of dialup modems on not-always-on computers at home these days.
My home PC has about 5000x the CPU horsepower and 300x the network speed of the VAX I used to manage as a departmental mail server, and by running a mail server myself I can theoretically have much better control over my outgoing mail, and Linux comes with several mail systems that are better than the mid-80s versions of sendmail. (In my case, I don't actually bother, because inbound mail service is a lot harder than outbound, and the service providers who do the first few steps of inbound filtering for me do a good enough job on my outbound mail.) It's certainly powerful enough for me to run a mailing list to send party announcements to a few hundred friends.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks