Re: More on spamming..

[Alex Bligh <]

> On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Paul Thornton wrote:
> 
> > I have to agree with Alex here.  If we can persuade ISPs (and customers who
> > have mail servers which can relay) to fix their configurations to deny
> > relaying except for their own hosts/networks then we have made a big step
> > forward.
> 
> but it still doesn't solve problem of spamming. 

Long term:

It doesn't solve it, but it helps it. One of the main problems is
traceability. IE you don't know where the spam has come from. If
noone third-party relayed, then when my users get spam, I'd know the
IP address of the machine it came from originally. This would be
good. Another necessary fix is for ISPs to keep record of which
user had which IP address at any given time, and to keep contact
details for all their users (this is desirable for secuirity and
legal reasons too). If you build these two things together with
a term in peering agreements that classifies spam abuse in a similar
manner to the way most agreements currently classify security
problems (i.e. mutual terms for traceability and action), and
one hopes that similar terms are already in place in transit
agreements, then one should be better able to get spammers
removed.

Short term:

The other more obvious reason why it helps in the short term
is that in conjunction with a realtime BGP feed like that
on http://maps.vix.com, you (a) ensure that you have no 3rd
party relayed spam, and (b) have the addresses of many commercial
spammers blackholed. Of course they move IP addresses, but the
larger ones soon get their networks blocked as a whole. Then
they have to go back to their provider to change IPs. Eventually
the provider will become bored of this (vz. Cyberpromo & AGIS).
But it *does* reduce the amount of spam.



-- 
Alex Bligh
GX Networks (formerly Xara Networks)