Re: spam-tools?

[Sabri Berisha <]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Paul Wouters wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Jan-Pieter Cornet wrote:
>
> > > emergency mail server migration, and was knee deep in DNS and MS hell,
>
> For the record, that was a typo. i meant MX hell :)

clue++

> > 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.
>
> Just to show what happened, since it triggered some email. When moving
> servers both physically and to another backbone ISP, I had a setup where
> at some point I had two mailservers, while I wanted ofcourse one mail spool.
> One link was relatively slow, and the machines 200km from each other, so
> doing /var/spool/mail over NFS wasn realistic.
> At some point, you can't really avoid having two different MX records
> circulating. And yes, the fallback MX at the time which was in the UK
> at the time wasn't trustworthy enough. All in all, a tricky non trivial
> situation. So I decided to portwarded port 25 of the old server to the
> new server. That ofcourse needed relay permission on the new mailserver
> of the old server.

Why didn't you use a smarthost entry then? In that case, the incoming mail
would still be checked..

> I hadn't realised spammers were checking it this closely, and within 20
> minutes I had received the first complaint, and killed the port forwarding.
> In total, about 50 emails were relayed through our system.

> Then the ORBS tester came, failed to relay. I complained to ORBS because I
> don't agree with their policy and got blacklisted. Hence the "not relaying"
> and "blocked" entry for my server

Blocked is a different list and site admins may choose that differently.

> (which btw when we moved stayed at the
> old IP which another customer of our old backbone ISP got. Another reason
> why ORBS was stupid, because they never removed the IP even when I sent
> them an email saying they should adminsitratively block our new ip and
> release the old one.

That's stupid indeed. Did you try to mail Alan Brown directly?

> The whole point I making is that this entire situation was under control,
> and the manual addition to ORBS was totally uncalled for.

Obviously not; 20 minutes after your box became an open relay, it was
being abused.

> > ORBS never did any portscanning, you must be confused with something else
>
> ORBS scanned any IP you fed it. Whether you want to call it mailport
> scanning or port scanning or relay scanning, isn that relevant.

Doesn't any other anti-spam-open-relay-list-system do the same?

> ORBS had a personal agenda, and not a published policy that it kept itself.

Do have it? Or have any proof of your statements?

> > Portforwarding is a VERY stupid thing to do, just run mailservers on
> > both machines, with appropriate configuration.
>
> See above for some more details. It was the only solution I had.

"smarthost"

> > Receiving email has nothing to do with ORBS,
>
> If sending fails because you are ORBS listed, there are (suprise!) people
> who can receive email anymore.

Their admins has made that decision for them. On the network I operate I
do not use any for of open relay listing because we feel that is up to the
customer himself to decide. Blame the admin for blocking, not ORBS.

> As for mr.Berisha's bitterness on journalism, and his rejected claim to the
> "Raad van Journalistiek"

Which was not a claim.

>  regarding my article on tapping in the Netherlands,
> I suggest we keep this off this list. If people are really interested, please
> read either my, Cryptome's or Mr. Berisha writing at:
>
> http://www.fnl.nl/ct-nl/archief2001/ct2001-06/
> http://mohave.bit.nl/~sabri/ct/ (seems to have been forced onto geocities now)
> http://cryptome.org/nl-tap2.htm

> Dutch readers can read the next c't for a clarification.

The simple fact that I mention you are a journalist does not justify
spamming for "your" magazine or urls.

You relay spam, are bittered when ORBS lists your open relay and you spam
for your magazine... *g*.

I don't think anyone on this list is interested in being spammed on an
antispam list.

-- 
/* Sabri Berisha CCNA,BOFH,+iO        O.O        speaking for just myself
 * Join HAL!!: www.HAL2001.org ____oOo_U_oOo____ http://www.bit.nl/~sabri
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 *   Anonymous sysadmin - on IRC                                       */