Re: spam still sucks, was Port 25 inbound blocking

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com>
Date: February 24, 2009 6:57:22 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] spam still sucks, was Port 25 inbound blocking

Once again we are reminded that spammers and other criminals are
screwing up the Internet for everyone, but this particular case
is not very persuasive.

> As my server does not send mail at all, there is no way it can become
> a port 25 zombi for spammers.

Unfortunately, that's untrue.  Zombies have their own mail engines and
don't depend on existing mail software.  There are real spamming
attacks that use inbound port 25 on consumer computers, notably some
split routing tricks that route outbound and inbound packets over
different networks to hide the identity of the actual spamming host.

> Forcing inovators such as my self to contract an outside email relay
> port hopping service is not a 'fair use' strategy and not a customer
> centric focus.

There are a lot of ways to collect mail on your PC other than running
your own SMTP server.  Probably the easiest is to use one of the seven
email accounts that Comcast provides, or to set up a free account on
Gmail or Hotmail, and poll it with the usual POP protocol.  Yes, this
would require a modest amount of reprogramming (or maybe not, if you
can use the popular fetchmail package), but anti-spam measures are all
based on statistics, and statistically there are vastly more zombies
on consumer ISPs than hobby mail servers.

R's,
John






-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com