Spammers hapless fate = ISP toil and sweat

At 17:38 16.09.97 -0000, Luis Miguel Sequeira wrote:

>job. They are a strong force which will easily overthrow any basic
>measures taken against spamming - like simply filtering up domains,
>or blocking traffic from relaying machines.

Would think that a "nospam" in the address would tell them that we're
not interested, but...  :(

>Secondly, they are vindictive and protect their own jobs. This means that
>if an ISP tries to agressively implement anti-spamming mechanisms,
>they will fight back! And how they do this? For instance, they send out
>forged emails with these ISP's addresses. What happens? Entities receiving
>the forged emails will complain to the ISP in question. The ISP replies
>telling that the emails are forged, trying to make them understand that
>this is the "spammer's revenge". Most of these entities either don't care
>or don't believe, so they just shut the ISP off their firewall (especially
>if on the next day they get a new lot of unsolicited email apparently coming
>from the same forged addresses...). 

Well, I usually get positive replies when I answer that it's a forged
header.  Now, abuse at online.no always replies manually to every mail we
get, and that might help, of course.  Also, I always point out how to
read the header, and where they got it wrong.  That too seems to help.

>This forces the ISP to open up themselves
>to spamming from this particular company, hoping that they won't forge
>spamming attempts in the future...

It depends on the ISP.  In those cases where people shut our domain out,
I've contacted the sys-admin at the remote site, and so far, we've been
able to figure out a solution.

>Do you think that there is some interest in mantaining a mailing list for
>all postmasters from the LRs for the sole purpose of discussing anti-spam
>techniques and listing spamming domains and relay machines?

I at least would be interested.  It would be far less public, and thus
far less exposed to harassment, than news.admin.net-abuse.*
Those who post regulary there, will discover that spammers pick up their
address and subscribe them to lots of spamming-lists, or just mailbomb them.

>There is also an issue of local laws. Filtering out spam *could* be illegal
>on some countries (it violates freedom of speech). 

I though that "freedom of speech" only gave you the right to say what you
wanted without fearing punishment from the government, but not where you
want.  Now, I don't know the laws in all countries.  Does anybody know
of any country with such laws?

>Portuguese law. There is a case of mail bombing (a particular kind of
>spamming...) brought to court - it will take ages to be ruled and probably
the
>offender will get away with some community work :) but it will be judged in
>court. Of course, on other countries, freedom of speech may be more important
>than using others' telecommunications resources. I wonder if local laws will
>actually work *against* a RIPE-based global effort across Europe.

For a while, it might.  But I think a change in local law will come in most
countries, when the authorities understand the problem with this.  

>A better way to deal with this is simply ignore the message, and make sure
>that 
>all your users ignore the spam, too. In the long end, this means a lower 
>"success rate" for a particular domain/spamming technique, so the spamming 
>companies will probably try somewhere else.

I don't agree.  There will always be new spammers, and I don't think
ignoring the spam will make it go away.  But since most of the spam comes
from USA, one effective way is to say that you regard this as a "Denial of
Service"-attack.  The US law is pretty strict on this.  


en
-- 
Regards,

Ina Faye-Lund
Abuse
Telenor Nextel AS