Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 04:22:05PM -0800, thomas AT tbeckett.com wrote:
> > Spammers have been tolerated for long enough.
> >
> > It's time to go to war.
> 
> This idea has merit.

Um, I hate to jump in and bust everyone's bubble, but as a mail admin,
I have to ask: how many of you have actually ever run a mail server?
Ever get "joe-jobbed" or "relay-raped" or blacklisted after being hit
by a tester? Ever had to spend hours working up your rulesets so that
your customers could send and receive mail but unwanted people
couldn't? Ever deal with customers or clients who couldn't get mail
from some domain you'd written off as rogue, like usa.net or jps.net?

Ever wake up in the morning to find that the DNSBL you've been using
is no longer working because some idiot in Michigan brought the heat
down on its operator for sending a perfectly legal message to a broken
Lotus Domino mail server, or had your message queue back up so much
that new mail was being refused, because the operator of a DNSBL you'd
been using disappearedd off the 'Net? How many messages bounced? How
many times had it happened before? How do you know?

Ever lose business because the antispam measures you'd put in place
were prohibitively complex for folks not using Eudora, mutt, or pine?
Have you ever contributed code or time to an antispam project such as
Vipul's Razor, SpamAssassin, etc.? Ever had to deal with false reports
from SpamCop implicating a customer of yours for having the bad luck
to have their URL included in a spam message? I have. It sucks. I'd
rather be out having a beer and enjoying the weather than running after
these infantile spamming morons trying to clean up their messes.

How many of you have verified that spammer's email addresses are real?
How did you do that? How often among the spam you receive did you find
that the "From" address was anything other than a faked Freemail acct
or a "joe job": mail sent out with someone else's address in the From
field, whether through malice or stupidity?

I once got some 15,000+ bounces from an idiot in the Netherlands who
spammed on behalf of webdesignNL.com - just because he mistyped (I
don't know if deliberately or not) and left out an n. Oops. That took
me a few hours to sort out, and then I never got resolution from the
ISP hosting the bastards.

Do you really want to abuse /me/? I hope not. But that's what your plan
would likely mean.

The only ways to defeat spam are to identify it quickly and filter it
into oblivion; identify and refuse to accept mail from open relays, or
tag such messages so that they can be filtered into oblivion; and report
any spam you get if feasible, so that responsible ISPs can take action
against their customers or investigate abuses.

If you really want to stop spam, do some research, find out who the
spammers are - in reality, in person - and go break their fingers. It's
possible, and you can even find spammers in the Triangle.

 http://makeashorterlink.com/?J1FE23A9
 http://makeashorterlink.com/?K10F21A9
 http://makeashorterlink.com/?N21F21A9

Of course, spam isn't illegal, yet, and breaking people's fingers in a
vigilante action /is/ illegal, but then so is the abuse of network and
computer resources. 

Sure, let's raise the cost of spam so that it becomes more difficult
for them to make money. But don't raise that cost at the expense of the
people who make the system function: mail admins and ISPs, who will in
all likelihood be the innocent and frustrated victims of your campaign.

Steve

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