Re: SPEWS?

[Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 10:45:03AM +0200, Jim Segrave wrote:
> All this sounds very nice. But:
>
> If the only way to contact SPEWS is via postings in a newsgroup, an
> ISP may find themselves unable to make any meaningful response (there
> are issues of customer confidentiality, business considertaions, a
> whole lot of reasons that an ISP might not wish to discuss the alleged
> wrongoings of one of its customers, the measures which it has or might
> take or the details of contractual relationships or legal advice they
> have received. So all of this is really irrelevant to the topic at
> hand. 

Not to mention the fact that they probably won't believe you or delist
you. Take a looksie through:  
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=news.admin.net-abuse.email

"Hi, we used to have a spam problems from our customers but we've cleaned up"
"You profited from spam! You go to hell, you go to hell and you die!"

"Hi, we are a law firm that bought from UUnet and it seems the last owners
of this IP block were spammer. We're not, can you please remove us."
"Every heard of due diligence? Thats what you get for buying from UUNet, 
you'll get unlisted when they clean up all their spammers."

"Hi, we bought from some people who turned out to have a problem with
hosting some spammers, but we're locked into a 3 year contract. We're a
small shop without the money for lawyers to get out of it. We're not
spammers, could you please unblock this one piece of IP which is just us."
"Sorry, you have to change providers. They breached your contract by 
failing to provide full internet access (since people are filtering them 
based on our listing)"

Noone in their right mind would trust SPEWS directly, the problem is 
people trust Spam Assassin, and Spam Assassin uses relays.osirusoft.com 
with enough weight to kill an email, and osirusoft uses SPEWS. I don't 
like spam any more then anyone else, but this situation is damn near 
pathetic.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)