Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 07:28:09 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org> Date: September 18, 2007 9:58:25 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net>Cc: Robert Grosshandler <rob () iGive com>, Adam Thornton <adam () io com>, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net>, Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>, David Ian Hopper <imhopper () gmail com>, Victor Marks <vxm () miglia com>, "Danny O'Brien" <danny () spesh com>, Tom Fairlie <tfairlie () frontiernet net> Subject: Re: [IP] AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf
Several points in no particular order. 1. If two large ISPs independently begin blocking mail from a given domain/IP address/network block/etc., then it's usually a pretty good sign that there is an issue with the mail source. 2. AOL has a responsive and clueful postmaster team, and provides pointers to contact information for it in reject notices issued to refused SMTP traffic. Has anyone from Truthout used those contacts to find out what their view of the issue is? 3. Truthout's listed contacts for its domain don't work: one apparently goes directly to Truthout's own mail server(s) and is refused with a "user unknown" error; a message to the other has been enqueued for several days awaiting receipt by the destination mail server. A message to the Truthout postmaster address (mandatory per RFC 2821 for all domains that send or receive mail) was rejected when sent from my own account, and *possibly* accepted when sent from my own postmaster address -- but no response yet. The point being that domains which make it hard for people to tell themearly on that they may have problems may find that those problems escalate
considerably before they finally become aware of them. 4. The socially-engineered DoS attack suggested by Adam would probablywork in some circumstances. But it shouldn't work with a sufficiently-clued
ISP and a sufficently-clued mailer: the ISP should be able to detecta flood of fabricated abuse reports, and the mailer should be able to produce
proof-of-subscription...which in turn can be correlated against the ISP's own outgoing mail logs. That is, if fred () aol com signed up for the republicrat-discuss-list () example com, then example.com should have at some point emitted a confirmation request (noted in aol.com's logs) and fred () aol com should have responded to it (also noted in aol.com's logs). This won't work perfectly of course -- log retention is one question, and confirmation-via-individual-URL is another. But the abuse staff at any ISP should long since be aware of the existence of "joe jobs" (as variants on this are called) and should be suspicious of any abuse case where the evidence is entirely too neatly arranged. Doubly so if example.com seems to have been doing everything "right" in the past. 5. Brett's right about MoveOn (which has been blocked here for several years, not because of political agenda, but because of spamming issues). But the same could be said of organizations all over the political spectrum: a cursory check of the configuration here shows domains belonging to both major US parties, as well assome religious-oriented domains, lobbying groups, individual politicians, etc., all blocked for spamming. I don't wish to speak for anyone else in
this thread, but I think most of us find ourselves far too busy blocking spammers to even begin to think about the onerous and never-ending task of blocking every organization whose political/social/economic views we personally happen to disagree with. (Heh...I'll leave that to the censorware vendors, whose affiliations and funding have already been explored at great length by others.) ---Rsk ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 15)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 15)
- AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 16)
- Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 16)
- Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 18)
- Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 19)
- Re: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications NOTE DUE TO THEIR REPUTATION djf David Farber (Sep 19)