Re: spam-tools?

[Jan-Pieter Cornet <]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 02:39:23PM +0200, Paul Wouters wrote:
> There are enough horror stories of ORBS everyone on this list knows. The
> most simple and stupid thing of ORBS was that people could submit IP's,
> and they would test and block it within the hour. If you've ever done a

No, that's a service. ORBS served as a centralised relay test facility,
by having that facility not tell you the outcome as soon as it knew, it
would lose that value as centralised testing facility.

> emergency mail server migration, and was knee deep in DNS and MS hell,
> the last thing you need is to have one of your IP's blocked because a
> spammer and an ORBS user found your temporary mail server.

You mean that you don't like ORBS because you are bad at doing your job.
This is the wrong reason for not liking something, and sounds more like
blame delegation to me.

"I'm sorry I reared my truck into your house, but it's an MS truck, and
I'm in a hurry, so it was an emergency, OK?". No, it's not OK. I *want*
ORBS to block servers configured by clueless operators who leave open
relays.

> > If ORBS would scan you with the intent do send unsolicited bulk email
> > through your server you would have a point.
> 
> Port scanning is in violation of some telecommunication laws and even more
> AUP's.

ORBS never did any portscanning, you must be confused with something else
(IMRSS?). ORBS simply tests MTAs if they are open relays.

> > Please do note that where you read "ORBS" you could read any other
> > relaytester which tests with the purpose of informing *you* of any
> > misconfigurations and therefor protecting *you* against your own possible
> > stupidity.
> 
> The difference is that systems like RBL only block you after they are
> convinced the admin can't or doesn't want to be reached. Instead of cutting
> you down, they actually try to *help* you fix any problems.

ORBS tries to help too. Every open relay administrator immediately gets
a mail, describing the nature of the problem, with pointers to webpages
detailing on how to fix things.

But ORBS tried to help end-users too, by listing open relays as soon as
possible, so you can block the spam coming from them.

> Also stupidity is a very relative term. For instance, migrating and allowing
> all local IP's to relay through your mailserver, opens up a subtle hole in
> that mail sent to old MX records (so old mailserver) gets a fully granted
> relay to the new mail server (because local IP is trusted), so people
> tend to forget that portforwarding during a DNS waiting time opens them
> up to spammers and ORBSlike actions.

Portforwarding is a VERY stupid thing to do, just run mailservers on
both machines, with appropriate configuration. Again, don't blame ORBS
for the fact that you can't do your job.

> Now, I don't MIND people telling me
> this, but to immediately ensure that a percentage of my users no longer
> can send or receive email for this is plain stupid and wrong.

Receiving email has nothing to do with ORBS, I don't think there's a single
MTA which refuses to deliver mail to ORBS listed hosts.

-- 
#!perl -pl      # This kenny-filter is virus-free as long as you don't copy it
$p=3-2*/[^\W\dmpf_]/i;s.[a-z]{$p}.vec($f=join('',$p-1?chr(sub{$_[0]*9+$_[1]*3+
$_[2]}->(map{/p|f/i+/f/i}split//,$&)+97):('m',p,f)[map{((ord$&)%32-1)/$_%3}(9,
3,1)]),5,1)='`'lt$&;$f.eig;                                # Jan-Pieter Cornet