So.. Sysadmin's have a range of techniques for stopping unsolicited mail, but everytime it's used, a new way is found to get around it. This sounds to me like spam is going to go on forever. Earlier on in this discussion, it was mentioned that spammers use test accounts to see if they get mail back - if you spam, you need to know how effective you are so that you can punish whoever tries to stop you etc. It makes sense. So why not focus upon making the spammers think they have succeeded. If there is a way of stopping spam to all but the test accounts then we are on a winner ;-) Maybe spammers could even get sloppy, if they thought that their work was successful. Any ideas as to how this could be achieved? As a second way of stopping spam, I think Europe has to push for a very clear law which defines spamming and can be used to prosecute those that are careless enough to give away their origins. Currently being a spammer could be deemed as a bit of a "buzz" - trying to beat the sysadmins at their own game etc. How about making spammers realise that they're disliked and are on a very fine line towards getting locked up ...seriously, if spamming is to be stopped for good, unfortunately spammers will have to be shown zero tolerance in legal terms. Either this will be achieved through court cases based on existing laws (such as the Portugese "unsolicited use of resources" law) or through new legislation specific to spam. Does anyone have access to legal resources who would be able to point us in the right direction? OK, I accept I have committed a bit of a "faux pas" mentioning Law ;-) but as far as I see, we are all having our resources used to devalue the commodity we trade in - Internet, and the only way to stop this is to 1. Make spammers think they're winning when they're not and 2. Make spammers pay for their abuse ten times over until they get the message that European ISPs will not tolerate abuse of their resources. Otherwise, as is the situation currently, our message will be "we don't like them, but will continue to play the game by your rules". Regards, Toby Williams BusinessNet UK - Internet for Business -----Original Message----- From: Poul-Henning Kamp [SMTP:phk@critter.freebsd.dk] Sent: 17 September 1997 19:54 To: Ina Faye-Lund Cc: local-ir@ripe.net Subject: Re: Spammers hapless fate = ISP toil and sweat In message <3.0.1.32.19970917202718.0190e980@online.no>, Ina Faye-Lund writes:

At 16:01 17.09.97 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

...

Have RIPE send a formal letter to AGIS and the IEMMC who houses most of these creep, and tell them that either they will cease to send spam to the following list of top level domains: {be, dk, ...} effectively today or the RIPE will orchestrate a pan-european filtering of all AGIS and IEMMC member networks until such filtering is in place. It should be pretty simple to simply filter all routes based on AGIS AS#(s), and maybe inject a bogus route for the IEMMC members networks.

That sounds like a good idea. Hmm... What about rejecting in the router; access-lists? That's what we mostly use, and that would

Simply deny all routes that originate in AS4200 :-) -- Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD coreteam member phk@FreeBSD.ORG "Real hackers run -current on their laptop."