[Mimedefang] Black Listed

[Peter A. Cole]

On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 11:17:14 -0500 (EST)
Andrea Venturoli <ml.ventu at flashnet.it> wrote:

> ** Reply to note from Mark Defang <defang at astroshapes.com> Mon, 05 Apr 2004 22:02:14 -0400
> 
> This is unfortunately quite a common problem, that me and my customers are having too.
> Just to make an example, spamcop is blocking Libero, which (although perhaps not so good at fighting spam),
> is a major Italian ISP, connecting maybe something like 20% of this country. Given that the even bigger
> Telecom is a lot worse and a lot more blacklisted, you can guess here the picture is not that good!!!
> I cannot write to many mailing lists any more (FreeBSD, for example; and I work on this OS!); some of my customers
> cannot contact their overseas partners and so on!
> I really believe the blacklist practice has gone a lot further than it should have! I personally have nothing against
> public blacklists, but I think their adoption should be a personal choice, not anything that is done ISP wide.
> 
> Just my 2 eurocents.
> 
>  bye
>         av.
> 
It's getting harder and harder to stop spam without inconveniencing innocent bystanders.

I work in an outsourcing company as a network admin in a primarily Windows environment, and I too have had issues with customers either being blacklisted or having issues caused by required recipients being blacklisted.

My ISP here (Bigpond) is about to implement blocking port 25 for all their dynamic IP customers. If you pay the extra $10 a month or if you are a business customer, then they'll leave the port open for you.

I'm pretty sure it's only outbound they're blocking, so while this will reduce spam for some users, it seems to be more of a butt covering excercise in that anyone with dynamic IP's cannot send spam via port 25, so the only one's who can, can easily be traced and prosecuted. This is my guess anyway.

As for a real solution to spam? I think in principal it's quite easy. No mail server should accept mail from any mail server that is not correctly configured. ie should have correct reverse MX records, reject mails with forged headers, etc. If this was done, spamming would become irrelevant.

Of course, this requires many changes to many mail servers, but at the end of the day it would ensure a completely RFC compliant mail infrastructure, thereby making spam easy to get rid of without the need to blacklist anybody.

There's my 2 aussie cents  :-)

Pete