Hello, On 27/12/2010 19:09, Joe St Sauver wrote:
jorgen@hovland.cx commented:
#So a quick summary: #An ASN does not represent a single legal entity
Actually, at least some ASNs do represent single legal entities. For example, AS25 is the University of California at Berkley and AS4983 is Intel, just to mention a couple of many examples.
Maybe or maybe not. You have probably no way of knowing that one day to another unless you work for those companies.
#Spam in general cannot be defined
Sure it can, and many folks offer definitions, including folks such as Spamhaus, see http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html
Other entities, such as MAAWG, prefer to opt out of the whole "what is and what isn't spam" debate, simply referring to "abusive mail" for things like their quarterly email metrics reports (see http://www.maawg.org/email_metrics_report )
Didn't you just show me that it in fact cannot be defined in general? :)
#It's not ranking the spam volume
People can (and do) track spam volume by IP, by the netblock encompassing a spamming IP, by in-addr domain, and yes, by ASN.
There are several ways to attempt to measure spam. The method used on that website is however bad, but I guess Quarterman was just making a point. A site that does measure real mail volume is senderbase.
There's also the pragmatic reality that you may not be allowed to do the sustained volume of whois queries you'd need to do to map all observed IPs to encompassing netblocks, but you can easily map IPs to ASNs at the rate that's required. (Besides, trying to work at the per-netblock level is pretty unwieldy when it comes to things like maintaining abuse point of contact information, while ASN point of contact information is far more stable).
Because something is easier doesn't mean it is better (the opposite also applies).
#Yes, I am really concerned that people might decide to blacklist ASNs #due to spam. It doesn't make any sense in almost all cases.
I'd have to disagree with your assertion that "it doesn't make sense in almost all cases."
There are some ASNs that may be routing only a small amount of space, and which seem to have an extremely strong correlation with badness.
I believe you are saying the same thing as I.
#But we already have blocklists aggressively doing that with netblocks #(uceprotect, spamhaus etc). No serious mailprovider in my neighbourhood #use those blocklists to block mail or anything else.
You must be in an unusual neighborhood since Spamhaus is generally considered to protect about 1.4 billion mailboxes worldwide according to http://www.spamhaus.org/organization/index.lasso
Certain blocklists have lost their credibility because of their ways of creating collateral damage instead of dealing with the real problem: Spam. The number 1.4 billion becomes interesting when some people believe there are only 1.3 billion mailboxes in the world. None of it is probably true. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_email_accounts_are_there_in_the_world Blocking entire ASNs is quite feasibly when you are incapable of filtering spam. Cheers,