More on spamming..

In message <199710011109.MAA02064 at diamond.xara.net>, Alex Bligh writes:
> > On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Paul Thornton wrote:
> > 
> > > I have to agree with Alex here.  If we can persuade ISPs (and customers who
> > > have mail servers which can relay) to fix their configurations to deny
> > > relaying except for their own hosts/networks then we have made a big step
> > > forward.
> > 
> > but it still doesn't solve problem of spamming. 
> 
> Long term:
> 
> It doesn't solve it, but it helps it. One of the main problems is
> traceability. IE you don't know where the spam has come from. If
> noone third-party relayed, then when my users get spam, I'd know the
> IP address of the machine it came from originally. This would be
> good. Another necessary fix is for ISPs to keep record of which
> user had which IP address at any given time, and to keep contact
> details for all their users (this is desirable for secuirity and
> legal reasons too). 

This is elementary; know who your customers are and what they
are doing with your infrastructre. 

> If you build these two things together with
> a term in peering agreements that classifies spam abuse in a similar
> manner to the way most agreements currently classify security
> problems (i.e. mutual terms for traceability and action), and
> one hopes that similar terms are already in place in transit
> agreements, then one should be better able to get spammers
> removed.

Almost all peering on the Internet today is 'soft'; in that
it is 'just packets' that is moved. If we are to get tough on
enforcing this we'll need lawyer-based peering aggreements. 
Remember the Internet of 1993 ? How fearful we all were about
getting such 'firm' peering aggreements, because it would
force us into a PTT-stand on almost all the models of pricing,
transit etc. that the Internet Community loathed (does it still?).

Are we ready for the 'firm' peering aggreement ?

> 
> Short term:
> 
> The other more obvious reason why it helps in the short term
> is that in conjunction with a realtime BGP feed like that
> on http://maps.vix.com, you (a) ensure that you have no 3rd
> party relayed spam, and (b) have the addresses of many commercial
> spammers blackholed. Of course they move IP addresses, but the
> larger ones soon get their networks blocked as a whole. Then
> they have to go back to their provider to change IPs. Eventually
> the provider will become bored of this (vz. Cyberpromo & AGIS).
> But it *does* reduce the amount of spam.

The other way is to keep up the self-justice. Drop the peering
with the bozo generating the spam. 

> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alex Bligh
> GX Networks (formerly Xara Networks)
> 
> 
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