Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 01:16:06 -0600 From: Blaine Minazzi <bminazzi@w3page.com> To: Greg Stringfellow <greg@prismnet.com> Cc: isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SMTP Relay probing - Should I follow up - advice? Message-ID: <356A6C36.25C841B5@w3page.com> References: <001f01bd886a$6a17d6a0$0285c6d1@darkstar.prismnet.com>
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Greg Stringfellow wrote: > > Blaine, > I do believe you want to take your frustrations out on the wrong people. Not > all of UUNETs customers are "fu*&ing bandwidth thieves and miscreants". So > why should we punish them? Now where in the hell did I say anything about _ALL_ uunets customers are bandwidth theives? First off, what I said was in reference to ALTER.NET. I said: ``Oh, I see... You CHOOSE to do business with companies that support these fu*&ing bandwidth thieves and miscreants....'' I did not say that Shaun was a bandwidth theif, but only that he chose to do business with a company that allows this kind of horse shit behavior. It is the spammers, that I called fu*&king bandwidth theives. The original subject is realying spam off of mail servers without permission. That is theft of services, plain and simple. I have sent numerous complaints to ALTER.NET, and have never seen an account cancelled, or any other action to show that ALTER.NET give a flying fox about anything other than $$$$. They are no better than AGIS used to be when they were the home for Spamford Wallace and the like. > Another way of looking at it is this, it looks like the account your > emailing from goes through a major backbone. Do you think they don't house a > few spammers? Should we all prevent you from emailing everyone else because > of it? Think about how smart that is. There appears to be a HUGE difference between SPRINT and ALTER.NET. I would have no beef with ALTER.NET if they enforced an anti-spam AUP against these kinds of users. Nothing can stop the occaional spammer, but ALTER.NET seems downright spam friendly. Maybe it's just appears that way, but a very large percentage of traceroute's I have done to spammers goes back to ALTER.NET. Complaints to ALTER.NET seem to generate no action, or have any account cancelled. That, plus others observations along the same lines leads me to believe that they are the new AGIS. The backbone our servers use has a AUP that prohibits spamming. They have, and will, cancel accounts of these kinds of theives. My "dial up" from home, also uses sprint. They have even gone do far as to not allow the use of ANY relay other than their own SMTP server for outbound mail for their dial up customers. So, people who use dial up from sprint's service cannot conceal their identity easily. There is even an X-Complaints line added to the mail header. I would call that fairly responsible of them. At least they are trying to stop the crap, unlike ALTER.NET. If ALTER.NET customers were denied services on a fairly widespread basis, how long do you think they would tolerate spammers? > I agree we should do something. But I think we all need to step back and > take a look at how we approach it. > > I guess I could take this conversation further but I don't believe it > relates to FreeBSD or how FreeBSD relates to an ISP. > > Greg Putting pressure on the wallet is usually a fairly effective tactic. Do you think that AGIS had some sort of religious conversion? I doubt it. I think the pressure of the internet community as a whole, and the outright hassle they went through because of their spam policies caused them to make a decision based on economic realities that hosting these assholes was downright bad for business. If you have ever had your server used as a relay, ( I have ) then you CLEARLY understand how this relates to ISP's. And since this is about the only ISP list many of us subscribe to, here is where it gets aired. I have the Anti Relay, ( pop before sendmail realay ), the RBL patches, the patches to stop incoming mail from "fake" domains, etc. all installed. The amount of time that sys admins all across the country have to spend to try and stop spam, and then clean up the messes these theives leave behind amounts to millions of dollars a year in lost productivity, and in some cases, they effectivily caused a Denial of Service for providers, with thousands in lost revenue, and a potential black mark on your name. Not exactly a trivial issue for ISP's, running FreeBSD or not. Of course, if we hold the thread to explicit FreeBSD _AND_ ISP issues only, then about 80% of the messages on this list would never get posted. Regards, Blaine To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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