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@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).
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
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? 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