nanog mailing list archives

Re: Purchased IPv4 Woes


From: Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:20:03 +0100



Den 12/03/2017 kl. 19.24 skrev Rob McEwen:
On 3/12/2017 2:00 PM, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
Den 12/03/2017 kl. 18.49 skrev Rob McEwen:
This motivation goes a LONG way towards countering the profit motives
that hosters/ISPs/Datacenters/ESPs have in selling services to
spammers - there is MUCH money to be made doing so. But the longer
term repercussions of damaged IP reputation makes that a *bad*
long-term investment (even if the short-term gains are lucrative).

Sorry but this is not true. The address space does not lose that much in
value and in fact most address space that has been used for end users is
already tainted in the same way (due to botnets etc).

First, I'm on the front lines of this particular fight - and my conversations I have with mail senders (of all various types) gives me constant 1st-hand confirmation of these facts you deny.

But don't take my word for it - consider the following article written by Brian Krebs:

How much IP address space have you bought or sold in the last year? Me? About 5k IP addresses, which might not be a lot but still more than most.

The article says nothing about the pricing of selling or buying IP address space.

Yes it is a fact that tainted address space is slightly cheaper than "pristine" address space. Slightly. And we will happily buy it because we are not using it for sending emails anyway. And so will a lot of other eyeball ISPs and that keeps the price up.

I am not complaining about the space we got. Some of it is tainted. We just assign users that complain about that some address space from untainted space. Most users never notice. But I can see the pain on a smaller hosting provider just starting out and he got unlucky with his first buy.

Having a spammer abuse your address space is very expensive, but NOT because the address space can not be sold. It can. But if you have to do that, you will have to tell all your other customers to change addresses and they will not be happy campers about that. Plus it is a lot of bother and I will bet you that spammers are generally not good paying customers.

The assertion that refusing to unblock address space that got sold somehow influences spammers is wrong.

Regards,

Baldur


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