Re: Getting open smtp servers fixed

[Gunnar Lindberg <]

>From owner-anti-spam-wg@localhost  Wed Sep  9 18:14:33 1998
>Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:40:35 +0200
>From: Jacques Kirsch <Jacques.Kirsch@localhost
>Message-Id: <18277.905355635.12940698.14326@localhost
>Subject: Re: Getting open smtp servers fixed
>To: netmaster@localhost, cornel@localhost
>Cc: netmaster@localhost, laitinen@localhost,
>    kirsch@localhost, <esa.laitinen@localhost, ANTI-SPAM-WG@localhost
> ...

>>Open third-party relays make tracing and stopping spam a lot
>>harder, and
>>should be closed.  The sooner the better.  The more noise is made
>>about
>>open relays, the better.

>I don't think that closing all relays is a strong weapon against
>spammers,
>so please, don't set up anti-spam mesures that are worse than spam.

Disagree. If spammers use your Open Relay:

    1)	You pay for their delivery; both CPU, disk, bandwidth and
	maybe "User unknown" bounces. Few people/orgs want this;
	you may need to try it once, but then you know...

    2)	You put something between me and the dialup ISP that the
	spammer is using (assuming dialup since that's most common).
	I.e. the exact time now depends on *your* clock and *your*
	Received: lines, regardless of what "date-time" I can supply
	(assume I have a Stratum-1 clock and you used your $5.00
	watch to set time when your host was re-booted last year :-).
	No serious ISP will examine dialup log files without accurate
	time info.

    3)	If he's "honest" enough to use his own leased line host
	(e.g. CyberPromo long ago) it would work to refuse SMTP from
	him, but if it's through your Relay, well, sigh.

Agreed that Relay control is not The Solution, but it does move
spammers more into the open. Still not easy to deal with, but at
least you can see them, i.e. less hard, i.e. better.

	Gunnar Lindberg