1998-02-04 - Re: Spammers

Header Data

From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
To: Simon Fraser <cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: f96889e1fdfd33407233c9db62a55fb3c9c919d811ead399d67ad8a96cccd2f2
Message ID: <3.0.5.32.19980203093050.0084dce0@popd.ix.netcom.com>
Reply To: <v03102807b0fcd856e294@[207.79.65.77]>
UTC Datetime: 1998-02-04 06:23:50 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 14:23:50 +0800

Raw message

From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 14:23:50 +0800
To: Simon Fraser <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Spammers
In-Reply-To: <v03102807b0fcd856e294@[207.79.65.77]>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980203093050.0084dce0@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>> Wouldn't it be nice to hold uu.net culpable for all their spamming ways.
>> They want to own the internet, let them hang for it.
>
>http://www.us.uu.net/support/usepolicy/
>It would be nice to differentiate between the spammers themselves and the
>ISP they use. 

You'd lose a class action suit.  More important is to get them to close
any open sendmail relays at their dialup sites (maybe they have by now),
since those formerly-useful servers are a major tool for spammers.
The other problem is just that they're big enough that if even a small
fraction of their customers are spammers, lots of spam comes from their
customers; at least they don't encourage it, unlike some providers.

If you want to cut way down on spam, there's Paul Vixie's
Realtime BlackHole List service at maps.vix.com.  It uses DNS as a 
convenient query/response server and some short sendmail scripts
to block mail from any site known to have an open smtp relay.
They're fairly zealous, and don't mind throwing away a few extra 
babies to get rid of lots of bathwater, so if you don't want to block
everybody that they block you'll need to hack some sendmail configs.
My main frustration is that they block mail from the ix.netcom.com
smtp servers, which blocked mail from me to the PGP-users list,
but I've found another relay at Netcom that they don't know about :-)
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639






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