Osirusoft Blacklists The World 947
NSXDavid writes "Earlier today our site mysteriously ended up on Joe Jared's Osirusoft SPAM blacklist which is used by lots of antispam software (like SpamAssassin and sendmail). Since he is currently under a serious DDoS attack, there was no way to appeal this decision. We contacted Mr. Jared by phone who informed us that 'everyone needs to stop using Osirusoft and that he's going to be shutting the service down.' Then he says he's going to blacklist 'the world' (aka, ban *.*.*.*) to get his point across. Later on this evening, he apparently went ahead and did just that. Succumbing to lawsuits and DDoS, a once great blacklist is dead. SpamAssassin is removing it from their config in the next release (rc3) and email admins around the globe are reconfiguring their mail servers."
ouch! (Score:2, Interesting)
JEFF K wins again! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the spam I get comes from those domains, or at least it is spoofed to appear its from there.
Whoa (Score:3, Interesting)
Good riddance to bad rubbish (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe in fighting spam, and I think that blacklists are a good idea to a certain degree, but I've always felt that SPEWS was too draconian, and had no option for recourse for those of us who were (as they put it) "collateral damage".
I posted to the referred newsgroup a few times, and got nothing but venom from the locals.
I'm not sad to see them go.
So what DO we do? (Score:5, Interesting)
One idea I've had (or maybe I've heard it somewhere else, I can't remember) is authorization. Change the protocol, or maybe just implement at server, so that before anyone can send you an email they have to request permission. In that request they would identify themselves, and before they start emailing you stuff you would have to send them back permission. Anyone that is in your contact list would automatically be given permission. If it turns out to be spam you could revoke permission. Also analyze the email header and do reverse lookup to see if the domain names resolve properly. If a domain is spoofed, deny it automatically.
Perhaps this has been done before, and I'm sure there are flaws, but I am tierd of hearing about how big a problem this is, without hearing any good ideas about fixing it. Any other thoughts?
Bayesian Filtering (Score:5, Interesting)
blacklists -- bah! (Score:2, Interesting)
A blacklist is like the death penalty -- there is no 100% surefire positive no-mistakes without prejudice way to protect the innocent.
Look at the results of blacklists as similar to the casualties produced in a war -- you may kill a good many of the enemy, but how many of them were civilians?
perhaps this is a lesson that needed learned (Score:5, Interesting)
The IP address of my server happened to fall a few dozen numbers away from that of a spammer. As a result, it cost me thousands of dollars in lost time and expenses to track down the issue, contact my isp and have them contact whoever it is on Mt. Self-Righteousness that takes you back off the list. Getting on the lists takes day(s), while getting off the lists takes weeks.
Blocking entire IP blocks is nothing short of techie-terrorism. In other words, you can't convince the real wrong doers to stop, so you harm the innocent bystanders to try to get them to revolt.
SPEWS and those that support them point the finger at the ISP while purposely hurting innocent small businesses like mine. It's time they take responsibility for the tools they provide, and in this way, they are no different than Microsoft.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:1, Interesting)
The main problem would be that a determined spammer could post messages at will to a board, but that situation really isn't any different from the current situation where spammers can send emails at will to anyone.
My Postfix Logs (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally Postfix is a smart enough MTA so that during the RBL downtime it didn't reject any mail - the default behavior is to deliver if the RBL can't be contacted.
How *do* we fight spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that many people, for a variety of reasons (geography being one) can't change ISPs, and many ISPs (mine included) did nothing in response to my complaints (because they knew I wasn't going to move). So what does this do? It certainly doesn't help anyone!
I hate spam as much as the next gal, and I think that the SpamAssassin approach (which is to label mail as spam depending upon certain criteria) is a much, much better approach than blacklisting.
This have anything to do with changes at Spamhaus? (Score:3, Interesting)
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 18:42:07 +0100
From: Steve Linford
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: SBL soon only from sbl.spamhaus.org
If you currently use the SBL by querying the master zone
sbl.spamhaus.org then you can ignore this message.
If you are using the SBL via 3rd party composite DNSBLs and not
directly from sbl.spamhaus.org, then please read this as the
following change affects your DNSBL setup.
For a long time the SBL has been available either directly from
Spamhaus (as sbl.spamhaus.org) or via 3rd party composite zones such
as relays.osirusoft.com (as spamhaus.relays.osirusoft.com) and
blackholes.easynet.nl which import SBL data from Spamhaus. This
distribution is now changing. In order to better manage SBL
logistics, DNSBL zone and query traffic, from Monday 11 August 2003
the SBL should only be available from sbl.spamhaus.org.
The fact the SBL was available from multiple DNSBLs was causing some
confusion, plus other small factors (such as the different zones
having different build times - which for example meant that we'd tell
someone an IP had been removed, but they'd contact us a few hours
later to say it was still blocked), plus the likely emergence of
further composite lists which may add confusion, meant that it was
time to make a change now rather than in a year or two.
So, if you are not using sbl.spamhaus.org but would like to continue
using the SBL, please add sbl.spamhaus.org to your mail server's
DNSBL list.
--
Steve Linford
The Spamhaus Project
http://www.spamhaus.org
Re:Sweet, Sweet Justice. (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually that was exactly what I thought happend when I dealt with my Sendmail servers this morning.
For a few minutes, I entertained the idea that the original owner had let the domain expire accidentally, and a spammer who had been blacklisted by Osirusoft sniped the domain, quickly setting up a DNSBL list to cause problems for everyone who used Osirosft. Thus admins everywhere remove Osirusoft from their DNSBLs and said spammer is (hopefully) free to spew their message without fear of blacklisting.
Clearly, there would be flaws in this spammers' plan (I use multiple DNSBLs), but that wouldn't be the first time spammers didn't think something all the way through.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:5, Interesting)
They already get through whitelists... a few months ago a person I provided free webspace for got a nasty porn spam with my address in the *from*. She was rather concerned. When she contacted me, I found that I had in fact recieved the same spam "from her." What's more, her address was a special purpose address that was only listed on the website I provided for her. A few lines lower on the site was a "Thanks to Scott Walde for providing this webspace for free" with a link to my email address. The only reason I can see for using email addresses found near each other this way is to get through whitelists. (software or human... I often scan the "from" to decide which emails to read.)
--srw
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Alternatives are confiriming the email (respond with this specially crafted string as subject) or running some computationally expensive operation For example, postmasters of well adminstered machines may run a number factoring service: to prove that a non-whitelisted message isn't spam, they are willing to spend their computational resources to factor a largish number for you.
The idea for both of these is that the main difference between spam and legit mail is that a legit sender will have just a few recipients but many messages, and thus can afford a one-time-per-recipient hassle to get on a whitelist, while a spammer cannot.
Neither address distributed compromised senders, which is effectively a way for spammers to make others pay to get on whitelists. If whitelists become wide-spread, a worm-based mass-compromise is the only option left to spammers.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I don't use whitelists as my primary spam defense, I use an aliasing service (spamgourmet) that allows me to automatically create any number of email addresses with a limited life span. Once someone appears trustworthy they get my main email address (spamcop). Since no one is supposed to know my real email address, it can be changed at a moment's notice -- like the night before last when it was filling up with viruses.
Re:So what DO we do? (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean like TMDA? From their freshmeat description:
The Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TMDA) reduces the amount of SPAM/UCE (junkmail) you receive. It combines a "whitelist" (for known/trusted senders), a "blacklist" (for undesired senders), and a cryptographically-enhanced confirmation system (for unknown, but legitimate, senders).
The problem is, that's fine and dandy for most things, but are you sure every mailing list you're on is whitelisted? Did you remember to whitelist any companies you do business with? I'm sure their auto-responders aren't going to respond to your automatically generated cryptographically-enhanced confirmation system so you may not ever get that info about your eBay bid or the receipt for an online purchase. You may have whitelisted store.com but their confirmation mail comes from store.yahoo.com, etc. What do you do? It's an annoying problem. I say legalize the ability to punch known spammers in the nuts once per spam message. That should fix the problem.
Spammers: BRING IT ON (Score:5, Interesting)
I have got to say. I sure do like the Unix's. Linux, BSD, OS X -- doesn't matter. A little thinking, some *shell* scripts, and even a few hack job "vi" scripts. Version
I've tried spamassassin, this filter, that filter. For me, my way seems to be working _very_ nicely. I use it at home (Linux), at work (Linux & BSD) and for a few architect friends/clients (OS X). Years ago now (right after the lawyer's emailed me
Those are my harvesting address'. Nobody should EVER email them, realistically. Oh the spammers like to try dictionary type attempts/attacks. Thanks -- I added those to the alias database as well for future attempts.
A couple of hacked up scripts (I'm working on it in C for even FASTER speed and some learning
Can it scale? Sure -- I'm figuring between 3-500 messages a _second_ isn't a problem. More will simply get queued and then I may notice a "lag" on my server. Bring it on. 1 IP and I whack the entire
It's the
Sure -- sometimes somebody will in inadvertently get blocked. The bounced message directs them to a web page explaining what to do next. BEST solution is to call me. You know me right? Heck, you probably have my 800 number... Oh, you DON'T? Piss off then.
Heck, I even spell out a completely external email address (@Mac.com) that you can forward the blocked message to
Ever wonder what those MAILER-DAEMON messages are all about? The Windows user's machine _starts_ the transmit of the message and disconnect. Your mail server sits there waiting for data from them to a local user -- which becomes un-deliverable and drops a note to whatever you use for the postmaster (can't publish THAT anymore, can we?).
Re-routed now. Thanks, got ANOTHER IP subnet to black ball.
I've racked up a large chunk of the Internet already -- and the stat's only seem to be increasing. Of course I've "white-listed" specific IP's of ISP's mail servers as needed. 3 so far I think. Most ISP's will put their mail server on a different subnet than their assigned IP's. Thanks. 1 white-listing was for a dedicated single IP user who's neighbor turned out to be a spammer. He had words with his ISP -- the spammer was kicked after that turned into conference call.
Sure -- some loser ISP will see more money from the spammer and side with them. We all know those ISP's -- and I've seen the same IP ranges in their listings as mine. I doubt the legit customer will remain there for long as I know I'm not the only one blocking them. Ultimately $$$ talks and the spammers are going to run dry eventually. They're now resorting to theft of services since they can't find legit connections anymore...
REJECT(S) TODAY: 482
Subnets Blocked: 434210 (110289340 total hosts in the
Percentage: 2.834% (3906250000 Internet addresses' [~3.9 BILLION] Served
Subnets TODAY? 142 (36068 total IP's)
Harvested: 49 messages
URL Lookups: 0
That's 49 messages today to some dummy account. No hits for the right web page (from a blocked message) in the logs... 142 IP's (now complete subnets
Not a smart idea. (Score:4, Interesting)
Blocking *.*.*.* is a way to get people to stop using the server very quickly, though.
Re:sad news, but there are alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
Dont like it?
Then be part of the solution and start fighting network abuse in your country. Or you can whine like the rest of the plonked spammers and watch a boatload of mail admins nuke south america. There was an informal poll held in NANAE (network.admin.net-abuse.email) on how mail server admins block all of 200.0.0.0/8. And dozens if not hundreds of people replied they do block all of it. How long before it becomes thousands of networks block your country for spam abuse?
Re:Bayesian Filtering (Score:4, Interesting)
Please don't bother your Congressmen or Senators proposing legislation that might not work 100%. Just keep on filtering the spam I send you, I know you would have never bought from me anyway. That you can filter legitimizes my business and my waste of your bandwidth.
P.S. To be sure of not getting a false positive, be sure to send all filtered mail to a special folder. Waste your storage space storing the mail until you manually go through every piece to be sure you didn't accidentally filter something important. Of course, this will take exactly as much effort as it would have to just check the e-mail when it first came in, not to mention the extra effort spent in setting up the filters and the extra space for storing your incoming spam folder, but what the heck. If you think that you can scan e-mail for false positives faster this way you are just fooling yourselves, if you are scanning faster e-mail that you expect to be all spam, you will miss the very false positives that you think you are looking for. And any fales positives that you do catch will have been delayed, perhaps days or more. You geeks enjoy wasting time this way, and I certainly appreciate it. It makes the work of all us spammers much easier. After all, slashdotters like Moderation abuser [slashdot.org] tell you that Bandwidth is cheap, disk is cheap, CPU is cheap , which is good, because at the rate spammers like me waste it the costs still adds up. I am gald I never pay for it, and I would just as well that everyone else takes the additude that all of the resources I waste are cheap than band together and pass laws against us. No one should care about spam because Bandwidth is cheap, disk is cheap, CPU is cheap and it is your job to filter it.
Think you've seen this before? Don't complain. Just go through lots more work to set up special filers on your computer so that you will not see it again. You should have to do that. It's the true geek solution, and I would really like it if you did.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:5, Interesting)
That only works if I require them to sign mail they send to me, with my public key.
Possibly having a key system of public keys and private keys. You put your own private key out there, saying you'll accept mail with anything that signs their mail with the public key. You add any mailing lists you want public key, they sign all outgoing messages with their private key. Thus you'll accep their mail.
You can white list on anybody else you're willing, using a Web of Trust from PGP if they are considered "trusted" enough. However, that will lead to problems.
However, public and private keys will suddenly become tokens of value to spammers. Suddenly people will start creating worms, and scripted attacks to pull peoples keys. They will start trying to break into machines. It'll create a black market for trusted keys the world over. They'll just be new attacks, and new problems. Creating a large scale web of trust, won't work. A worm can easily go steal the tokens of trust, and then start using them to spam with. It'll just be another arms race.
Now letting forcing people to sign with your key is probably the most doable, but it also means that running mailing list software is a real, real CPU intensive application. I'm not particularly thrilled with that.
The only way to stop spam is to make it stop being cost effective, that involves causing e-mail to be an expensive operation if it involves untrusted e-mail servers.
Kirby
Anti-spam goals do differ and complicates things (Score:4, Interesting)
There are actually two different anti-spam goals. A few people have both of these goals, but quite many people have only one or the other:
The first goal includes such things as making sure children and sensitive adults don't see porn spam. But lots of people are simply offended by the spam, especially porn or body part enlarging spam. And others are simply offended by someone assuming they were interested in a great money saving offer for something they have no need for. This first goal seems to be what most people have, and what the current political rumblings are about.
The second goal is one a lot of people are not aware of, or don't understand. yet it is as serious a goal, if not more so, by certain groups of people. This involves reducing the network bandwidth and server processing resources used by the spam, or stopping it entirely. These things cost money, and it costs about 10 to 40 times as much money to receive (delivered) spam as to send it. It still costs 5 to 10 times as much just to take the SMTP connection, carry out the talk, discover it's a spammer, and refuse the spam.
In other words: the spam problem is not solved by blocking spammers ... just reduced in cost a good bit.
Solutions that involve scanning spam content for the nature of what spam looks like does not help reduce the costs at all. In fact it increases it because all this extra processing is now done by the server, and the network bandwidth is used to send the content that might otherwise not have been sent.
To those, like myself, whose goal is to reduce costs, SPEWS was a great tool. It was very effective in blocking spammers, plus it forced quite a number of ISPs to terminate the spamming scumbags that slipped into their networks under the guise of legitimate customers. In that way, it worked; it did what it was supposed to do. Too bad a few other ISPs were too stubborn to deal with the problem, and too many customers of spammer harboring ISPs whined more about why SPEWS was targeting them, and making excuses why they could not switch to a decent ISP (excuses that didn't apply in 99.9% of cases). Unfortunately, quite a lot of people simply never "got it" as to what the purpose of SPEWS was. The SPEWS web site was more geek/admin talk, and not well enough written for the average person to understand. I was starting to work on my own "how to get out of SPEWS" document, but I just haven't had time to put in on it.
There are a lot of things people say as to how to stop spam. The one I hear most often is that if people would just delete the spam, or if network admins would just block only spammers and no one else, then spammers would cease making money and would stop. This is simply not the case. First, not everyone will do this. We see from these recent worms and virii that way too many people don't patch their computers anyway. There will always be gullible people who respond, and there will always be spammers to take their money.
The real way, and I think possibly the only way, to stop spam, is to treat all spammers as equivalent to cyberspace terrorists. Take no prisoners, and take no excuses.
Remember, spammers don't care what people who will never respond do with the spam they send. They don't care if you press delete, or filter it out with SpamAssassin, or even block them. They don't care because you aren't going to make any difference to them anyway. And if you do block it, you won't be complaining to the spammer's ISP, and hence, they get to spam even more. To a spammer, someone who blocks their mail is better than someone who gets their ISP account terminated. This is part of why just blocking spammers is actually making the problem worse.
Re:Bayesian Filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the real solution is to have a trained monkey personally sort through your mail beforehand.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly why I think that SoBig is the perfect spamming mechanism. AFAICT, it essentially gets around nearly every non-content-based spam filter (ie Bayesian and SpamAssassin et al).
By sending spam from an amazing depth and breadth of compromised networks, it forces blacklist operators to go into "block everything" mode, which is so draconian that users of the blacklists will disable them.
As I posted in another story, if ISPs start blocking outbound port 25, the next iteration of the worm simply uses the Outlook SMTP settings to relay through the official MXs of the ISP. Given the flood of abuse reports, many ISPs (especially larger ones) are simply going to /dev/null abuse reports; they can be reasonably sure that their servers aren't going to end up in blacklists used by a lot of people (because heads will start to roll among the admins who use the blacklists).
By pretending to come from an address that has at most two degrees of separation from the recipient, they will get around a fair amount of whitelisting (this is exploiting the greatest flaw in TMDA and the like: trust of the From: address).
Re:Good riddance to bad rubbish (Score:3, Interesting)
I take that approach a step further: every week, I remove networks that have behaved for a certain period of time from the list.
Re:JEFF K wins again! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=1605 [somethingawful.com]
"In fact I received dozens of e-mails from network admins working for companies large and small who said exactly that with most also emphasizing that "only a lazy idiot" - to quote one of the e-mails - would use the SPEWS listing on their network."
"SPEWS provides a blocklist with zero oversight, zero accountability, and zero recourse for average users caught between their ISP and SPEWS.ORG's moral crusade. SPEWS will tell you that you in fact do have recourse and that is to switch ISPs. For Something Awful that is not economically feasible, for users in the nation of Brazil where their entire broadband provider has been blacklisted that is impossible. In addition to all this most of the SPEWS advocates on the newsgroups we so unceremoniously invaded demonstrated a willingness to add IP ranges to their own blacklists and potentially SPEWS for petty personal reasons. Complain about how SPEWS operates? Get added to the blacklist, often permanently, while they pretend that it somehow makes your situation worse."
Re:perhaps this is a lesson that needed learned (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a matter of the ISP trusting abuse reports. SPEWS does not identify itself when contacting an ISP -- they just send a standard abuse report like anyone else would.
Further, if SPEWS behaved irresponsibly, there would be evidence. Someone would be able to point toa SPEWS listing that was inaccurate, not a spammer. Despite many whiners claiming that such listings exist, no one has pointed to a single specific example.
Thank God! (Score:2, Interesting)
Even worse, since we were already "guilty", they wouldn't listen to our pleas of innocence, the dirty spammers that we were.
No, I don't feel sorry for these guys one bit. Their methods were about as good as the Salem Witch Trials. Most likely they weren't DDoS'd by spammers, but by people tired of the carpet bombing approach. You don't get away with banning a large ISP for one spammer, and you don't get away with trying to force your agenda on the world.
Good riddance.
Re:Sweet, Sweet Justice. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it goes deeper than that - to something more profound in the individual. I think that out of the some 6 billion people on this earth, most of them feel lonely. Getting an e-mail is great because someone out there seems to care - hopefully a friend or colleague. But then, you find it's just a commercial, or a piece of junk. In a way, you feel a bit let down... a bit more lonely, because you got your hopes up for a moment, only to have them dashed.
I have a similar feeling when I have received traditional junk mail that appears to be hand-written (particularly by a woman's writing), and appears to be possibly from some woman I once knew. I'm quite disappointed to find it's a bunch of junk for insurance, and I find myself actually angry about it.
Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think there is a psychological response that is at the heart of so many people hating spam.
So, your inbox chimes, and you have a new message and who knows what potential it may have. It's spam and it sucks. Maybe you even feel like you were fooled.
I, for one, divert any mail from a
Sysadmins and ISP's of course see the actual cost side, but that's a different story.
Re:If major blacklists can be sued... (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait until your customer sues your ISP for tortious interference and false advertising. Wait until they sue you the admin personally for a million or so and force you to either pay $250,000 to settle or endure a year with a major yellow flag on your credit record (thanks to having attachments on your assets).
I'll be laughing my ass off when that happens.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:2, Interesting)
RBL Consequences (Score:5, Interesting)
About a month ago Earthlink decided we were sending out spam and cut us off. So, despite the fact that we have no relationship at all to spam, we were unable to communicate with any of our customers who use Earthlink. After appealing, they realized the mistake and removed the block. How did it happen? Seems that if an Earthlink customer just accuses you fo spam you can end up on the list. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed at Earthlink and the matter was resolved quickly.
We were blocked by AOL once too. How ironic since we use to be their #1 3rd party content provider back-in-da-day (remember hourly?). They should have know about us. (grin) Fortunately that was resolved too.
Then, of course, today we got hit by SPEWS and that lead to our phone call to Mr. Jared. The poor guy was frazzled, and rightly so. But we had a legit beef...
Our business is entirely web based. We have to deal with a heavy volume of customer feedback, all of which want fast responses. Any hickup and we can get really far behind. But when we get blocked, we're almost helpless. We get an email "Hey, my character got killed by a ravenous bugblaster beast from trall!" And we write back, "Oh my, let me restore your character!" only to have it be filtered out by some shotgun blacklist. They get no response and start flaming us for "not responding". A day or more of this and things get really messy.
You start to feel like you are at the mercy of some so-called "authority" that could not care less about your guilt or innocence. If he or she wants to, they can just take you out. We've participated in opensource, contributed back, done the good netizen thing... yet this real-time blacklist thing hangs over us. We never know when something else like this is going to bite us. And maybe next time there won't be any appeal.
I've already seen Baysian filetering defeated. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, you could flag this message as spam, but then you slowly destroy half of what makes Baysian filtering work: The list of words that are not in spam.
Baysian filtering will probably be effective for a year at best.
Re:Not a smart idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
serves him right (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:2, Interesting)
If everyone did this....?
Say it takes 30 seconds to load in the Challenge website, read the word hidden in the
30 * 3000 = 90,000 seconds = 25 hrs!
Granted, I'd only have to do it once for each user. Oh, thats until they decide to change their subscription address or alter a setting on their software....
Even if only 10% of the users did this it would still take 2.5 hours to sort through. Thats assuming that they al used the exact same kind of C&R system so I wouldnt have to spend extra time reading instructions to figure out exactly what I have to do each time.
I agree we need a solution, but Challenge And Response isnt it.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:2, Interesting)
I run several mailing lists, free of charge. They currently require virtually no effort from me at all to maintain. I will not put in the effort required to jump through the challenge-response hoops - even if it's only a minute or so per challenge, that would amount to many hours of my time wasted. And I dread to think what it would be like for people who run larger lists with thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
So in the couple of occasions when I have seen that stupidity, I simply unsubscribe the user and, if they have an account on my system, delete the account and all their data.
Laugh it up, fuzzball... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:2, Interesting)
Apart from the problems in forcing people to pay for email (at what end, how to enforce cross compatibility etc), I want free email. It would really suck to pay even $0.01 (or even $0.001) for every message I send.
Simply deal with it. Install a decent filter, with lots of herustic and baysian checks, then deal with the one or two that leak through. Yes, spam of 50+ a day is bad, but most of that can be easily blocked by common, easy, free spam filters on any platform, even with settings so low that there are no false positives.
Alternatives such as charging for email or enforcing use of cryptography suck generally (signing requires me to type my password, or compromise my security by caching), but more than that they'll never be implimented. Forced signing (or somesuch thing) is standard with IPv6 - but has it been implimented? Try getting everyone to change; not going to happen. Install a spam filter and deal people.
Get to the root cause (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of shooting the messenger (the spammers), go after the one who is paying to have the spam sent.
Re:Blacklists and reality (Score:5, Interesting)
It's going to be functionally impossible to fix the problem of spammers opening an account and pumping email through it until it gets closed, but the transmission of email could be hardened by changing the SMTP protocol from 'call-up' to 'call-back'.
The SMTP protocol is set up to allow a host to contact another host and dump mail to it; there's no validation that the originating host is who it claims to be in the SMTP transaction. If you change the setup for the mail transfer connection to use the following mechanism:
This would establish a traceable chain of resolved hosts from the point at which the email entered the SMTP routing to its destination. Putting an email message into a mail transfer agent would still be vulnerable to the use of hacked or temporary accounts, but the upload would still require a trackable username and password for an account on the MTA. From that point, getting an MTA to accept an SMTP connection from a bogus host would require hacking the DNS server chain so that, when the receiving MTA host received the request, the IP address the passed hostname resolved to pointed back at the spammer's machine -- otherwise, you'd get a mail transaction sequence that looked like this:
Not a panacea, but it would make the mail hop path trustable until you start seeing hacked mail daemons that would mangle the mail hop path of any mail going through it -- but that would still leave the host with the hacked daemon having to identify itself, from which it could be blocked.
Re:Sweet, Sweet Justice. (Score:2, Interesting)
that's an outright lie, I was on there blacklist once and within 30 days I was off. I did process there request and had all my issues resolved. since then I have no problems.
Onepoint
Re:sad news, but there are alternatives (Score:2, Interesting)
The fact that the TXT referred to a similar netblock suggested that perhaps it was a typo (why didn't they block all of datapipe?) but nooo, no-one would entertain that possibility at all. The thread is derailed into a smug argument about how superior SPEWS is and how stupid you are for choosing your particular ISP. Real helpful.