Re: sprint

[Steve Linford <]

At 3:18 pm +0000 (GMT) 28/1/02, paul@localhost wrote:
>  Our company has today had the legal department of Sprint in the USA threaten
>  us because we said we would write to their corporate customers regarding
>  Sprint's spam support policies and urging them to dump Sprint. We get a
>  large percentage of our spam from persistent spammers on Sprint. We've
>  reported them to abuse but they've never been closed down. The spam
>  continues.
>
>  The Sprint lawyer said that our claims that they continue to host spammers
>  in breach of their AUP were untrue and that they would take whatever legal
>  action possible against us. We're not worried since everything we say is
>  true and Spamhaus bears this out (great site BTW).
>  We have written back to the legal department today asking for clarification
>  on why the sites we reported are still live despite their AUP. I don't
>  expect an explanation, they will ignore it or fudge the issue. Bottom line
>  is, you can see exactly what Sprint are up to on Spamhaus... and if it's
>  true, you can't sue.
>
>
>  Paul Gay
>  Director
>  Cactusoft Ltd.
Although things are now slowly changing at Sprint. Sprint is finally 
aware of the mess they got into and there's finally change coming.

Basically, after some of the worst spam gangs set up fake ISPs on 
Sprint (such as Ralsky/Cunningham/Haberli with Katelecom and 
Globalipx, doing their own BGP routing voodoo to look big) and over a 
year of ignoring complaints, Spamhaus put Sprint's corporate mail 
relays on the SBL - which worked very well as it focused action only 
on their executives. After a few weeks of that Sprint rang me up and 
said they were ready to talk (I was actually expecting them to sue 
but I got lucky).

Two weeks ago they assigned a NOC team to work with Spamhaus on 
getting the spammers off Sprint and a couple of the gangs are already 
gone (SAMCO, etc.), and there's now a new AUP in place. Also if you 
trace to katelecom now their feed is now via CW and Qwest (both also 
being fooled that Katelecom is a 'big ISP' with 'lots of customers' 
whom they in turn send 'warnings' to). Ralsky's /24 was kicked off 
but jumped back on again - the bugger had another 3 /24s lined up on 
Sprint under different names (each of which goes through a long 
'3-warnings' period where they just spam like there's no tomorrow).

The problem has been that Sprint had only one abuse guy and no 
software to collate or deal with complaints, so abuse@localhost was 
just one big blur of tens of thousands of complaints each day, and 
IMO the only person reading them was Dave Null. They promise that 
that's all changing now, they say they're putting new software in to 
deal with complaints properly, and to stop the spammers running round 
to the next Sprint sales office and signing back up again. So, 
there's still a lot of spam coming from Sprint, but there are now at 
least a couple of managers working on the problem and most of the 
spam gangs have had final warnings already.

The problem left is that Sprint are incredibly slow, getting them to 
do anything about spammers with T1s (most of the spam gangs do) is 
like dragging an elephant up a hill, their lawyers need endless 
evidence. So the situation is "keep yelling at them" or they'll slow 
down again, but "don't yell too much" now as we may have cracked it 
finally.

--
  Steve Linford
  Director
  The Spamhaus Project
  http://www.spamhaus.org