On Tue, 7 May 2002 18:21, Emile van Bergen wrote: > > I currently use the following black lists, and IMHO none of them give > > false positives. > > [SNIP] > > > dialups.mail-abuse.org, > > You must be kidding. This is a list that considers people who don't use > their provider's MTA as "trespassers" (quote from MAPS' information page > about this list), and assumes dialup/DSL people to be guilty by default. > > Making the ISP accountible for the mail sent by their customers by > having it forced through their MTA in this way is a senseless way of > approaching the problem, IMHO.
No it is a quite sensible way of doing it. When an ISP has 64,000 phone lines with associated IP addresses in active use then a spammer can just make repeated connections with different IP addresses to send out spam. Blocking one of the IP addresses used by a dial-up will do no good, as the person using it by that time probably isn't the spammer! Also you have to take some action against the ISP when spam goes through their network. Some time ago I was working for an ISP where the help-desk workers (the people who read postmaster email) were very unwilling to communicate in any language other than Dutch. They only grudgingly started communicating with me (the most senior member of the Unix admin team) after I promised to persue the matter through the chain of command and get their boss repremanded if something didn't happen! If you did get the help-desk people to read your complaint about spam (which would be unlikely if it wasn't written in Dutch) then there was only the smallest possibility that it might be forwarded to me as "user [EMAIL PROTECTED] was spammed by someone from our site" (without any headers, IP addresses, or time stamps), so I'd just delete the message as attempting to get the full details was more pain than it was worth. Also flaming the ISP in the nl.* usenet groups generally didn't do any good (although there was one single occasion when an intelligent person translated one of the flames to English and sent it to me and I then fixed it). The only solution to such a situation is to block dial-ups and then block the outbound relays from the ISP if they are used for spam. Blocking outbound mail is something that makes everyone take notice, and then people like me get the support they need to get things done. -- If you send email to me or to a mailing list that I use which has >4 lines of legalistic junk at the end then you are specifically authorizing me to do whatever I wish with the message and all other messages from your domain, by posting the message you agree that your long legalistic sig is void. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
