Re: IMC Update for February, 1998

[Markus Stumpf <]

On Tue, Feb 10, 1998 at 01:37:23PM +0100, John Martin wrote:
> At 12:03 pm +0100 10/2/98, Piet Beertema wrote:
> >    I thought that those of you who attended the spam BoF
> >    last week might be interested to note the IMC survey
> >    of publicly-known relaying smtp servers.
> >
> >The problem with this survey is that it is by no means
> >exhaustive (500 mail hosts is in fact peanuts compared
> >to the number of mail hosts globally), and probably for
> >that reason doesn't mention the names of the hosts that
> >allow relaying.
> 
> [If you remember, "naming-and-shaming" was thought to be unconstructive
> when discussed at the recent RIPE anti-SPAM BoF meeting. Is this what you
> mean? Personally, I think that this is a bit too agressive.]

What IMHO is completely overseen in this context is that there are not
only a lot of open MX relays, but also *much* more open workstations,
even in domains that have relay-closed MX mailers. And although this
workstations may be "protected" by valid MX records, they still have
open mailers which can be misused. (Take at random ONE big university,
collect all A records within that domain and its subdomains, and test
for relaying. I would predict an extremely high success rate.)

While most system admins may get their MX mailers closed they will have
problems doing this with the hundreds/thousands of workstations. And
even if they do, those systems - from my experience - are often maintained
by unqualified users and the next update they do will destroy the sysadmins
former efforts.

This will become a much more relevant topic in spam fighting than the
open MX mailers are now. At least IMHO :-)

	\Maex

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