RE: Problems sending mail to yahoo?

["Raymond L. Corbin" <rcorbin () hostmysite com>]

I agree that they aren't completely useless. From our environment the abuse desks can be somewhat overwhelmed though. 
If you setup feedback loops for networks size of
1x /16
2x /17
2x /18
1x /19
to receive abuse complaints on dedicated / collocated customers you do get a some good complaints. Some of the time it 
is from compromised scripts, sometimes actual spammers, but most of the time it is from forwarded spam. This makes the 
abuse desk full of thousands and thousands of complaints. You can look in the headers of the spam complaints and see 
that it is forwarded spam, but it is still overhead. So signing up for a feedback loop for the entire network with 
something like Yahoo! can be burdensome and make abuse@ full of useless complaints. This isn't the problem I suppose in 
most environments, but it is in mine. Yahoo! blocking entire /24's are not necessarily a large problem, the larger 
problem is

A. they don't tell you when it is blocked (I don't believe it would be hard to email the abuse@ contact of the IP 
address range..)

B. their 'Bulk Mail Advocates' say they cannot tell what IP's are generating the /24 block once it is in place (perhaps 
it can be prior to the block?).

C. They offer no way to exempt certain IP addresses to be exempted from the /24 'de-prioritization'. This means the 
smaller companies who send maybe 3 or 4 emails to Yahoo a day are having difficulty and there's nothing you can do 
until the issue with the entire /24 is solved.

Administrators who actually find ways to get in touch with Yahoo to resolve issues are hindered by Yahoo's stance of 
'It's coming from your network, you should be able to monitor it and figure it out'. In a dedicated/colo environment I 
don't think it is really reasonable to expect companies login to each server in a /24 to see who is sending mail to 
Yahoo. And even if they are sending mail to Yahoo were not psychic so we cannot tell what their users are marking as 
spam and what's not. I suppose the feedback loop would say that but...then abuse@ is flooded with complaints that are 
mostly mutual customers fault. Chances are if a server is sending spam to Yahoo they are sending it to quite a few 
other places as well which do actively report it.

-Ray


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog () merit edu [mailto:owner-nanog () merit edu] On Behalf Of Dave Dennis
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 7:16 PM
To: Geo.
Cc: nanog () merit edu
Subject: Re: Problems sending mail to yahoo?


On Sun, 13 Apr 2008, Geo. wrote:

> > of abuse might be useful for large providers, but since we can't even
> > get many domains even to set up the already-specified abuse@ address, much
> > less read the mail we send to it,
>
> When someone like AOL offloads their user complaints of spams to all the
> abuse@ addresses instead of verifying that they actually are spams before
> sending off complaints, is it any surprise that everyone else is refusing to
> do their jobs for them?
>
> The reason abuse@ addresses are useless is because what is being sent to
> them is useless.

As one that works for a company that makes full use of complaints sent to it,
abuse@ addresses are not useless, far from it.  Please don't get the idea that
because some think they're useless, it therefore is universal.  We also get
100s of AOL feedbacks a day, which are filtered separately.  Also not useless.
And we've also reported incidents to other companies' abuse functions, and had
them be resolved same-day because of it.  Also, far from useless.

How about if you're not actively in an abuse function, you hold off on declaring
the function useless, cause the meme could catch on that it is, even if it's
not, and I've yet to see an automated filtering/blocking system fully replace or
completely obsolete a good trained network operator who understands what is and
is not abuse on the network.

-Dave D