Re: regarding spam...

[Thorkild Stray <thorkild () linpro no>]

On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Crispin Cowan wrote:

> Kalat, Andrew (ISS Atlanta) wrote:
> What WOULD hurt the spammers is a spam filter designed to be deployed as 
> an EGRESS filter for large domains. I get an obnoxious amount of spam 
> from the same domains time and time again.  Some of them are free 
> webmail servers (hotmail.com, yahoo.com, mail.com, etc.) while others 
> are obscure Asian ISPs (263.net comes to mind). The clear pattern that 
> emerges is:

Most of the spams I get from @hotmail.com etc. are fakes.  They have just
faked the adress and used an open relay somewhere else. The accounts they
use for their faked from, doesn't even exist. Hotmail (for example) can't
be blamed. 

We've had clients that have created free, or almost-free, webmail
systems. 98% of all the spam they get accused of, never pass thru them,
and the account they use doesn't exist. If it exists, it has of course
been blocked ages ago. The remaining 2% get stopped quickly. 

Another regarded problem with this is of course the anti-spammers. They
complain about the spam. That's fine, but since they're either using
stupid scripts or can't read headers they end up complaining to a _long_
list of people who really are not to blame. I've seen abuse-mails with
50-70 entries CC'ed. None of them were to blame, and the offending relay
wasn't notified. When you get 50-70 of them a day, it gets higly annoying
to read your postmaster/hostmaster mail accounts. These people often dig
up the most remarkable addresses to mail. 

-- 
Thorkild Stray, Linpro AS                              <thorkild () linpro no>



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