On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 02:11:55PM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> You'll want to read this then:
Oh, great. *More* stuff to read. ;-)
> They really seem to have been working at closing holes in yahoogroups.
> for a while, that was a real pesthole, adn the spam being sent to yahoo
> lists seems to be getting under control.
Somewhat. On the other hand, I was forcibly subscribed to the "Nextel-1"
mailing list at Yahoo a couple of months ago and multiple complaints via
various channels into Yahoo got no response whatsoever. I've since received
mail from a couple of other people who saw my report of that incident and
say that the same thing has happened to them. This spammer's list is still
operating at Yahoo as of the last time I checked.
But yes, in general, the lists *are* better. What is still a complete
cesspool is Yahoo Stores, where all sorts of spammers operate with impunity.
> First, define "right thing"
Okay, fair enough: upon receipt of and confirmation of convincing evidence
indicating spamming, immediately and permanently terminate the customer
without prior notice. (This applies to all resources engaged by the customer,
not just the one implicated in spamming.) All funds, data and equipment
(if any) are forfeit.
Various responsible ISPs (e.g. JustTheNet) have variations on this theme
in their AUP, some written with considerably more elegance ;-), but the
basic idea is that *nobody* gets nuked on suspicion of spam -- because
joe-jobs are common and because due diligence demands that ISPs/hosting
providers/etc. take proper care to ensure that they've carefully weighed
the evidence before taking such a drastic step. But once it's clear,
termination is swift and final. Unsurprisingly, ISPs which have this
policy don't have much of a spam problem: spammers talk to each other,
and word gets around. The converse made be said of spam-friendly ISPs.
I find myself idly wondering how many list-owners here are having their
mail blocked not because of errant content-filtering but because their
own ISP has failed to remove its spammers, and is thus listed in
various DNSBLs. You can check this by dropping the IP address of
your outbound mail server(s) into any/all of:
http://relays.osirusoft.com/cgi-bin/rbcheck.cgi
http://combat.uxn.com
http://www.OpenRBL.org
http://www.spews.org
[ I moved my stuff out of Verio ~1 year ago for precisely this reason:
increasing chunks of Verio IP space were being listed by more and more
DNSBLs because Verio refused to remove its spammers. ]
> reality: spam isn't illegal.
It *is* illegal in 27 states and a number of countries, so far. Granted,
some of those statutes have an odd idea of what spam is/isn't, and some
of them have no teeth, and some of them will be revised or supplanted
by additional statutes (maybe), but -- to pick one -- spam is presently
illegal in Washington state.
> Second, at a high level, we ALL hate spam, at a more detailed level, we
> basically can't agree on what it is,[...]
Yes. It's surprising and disappointing to me that many people confuse
spam with "any mail that I don't want". Attempts at education continue. ;-)
> Third, thanks to the high preponderance of open relays overseas, it's
> not always easy for ISPs to do the right thing [...]
Absolutely correct. But ISPs which host the spamvertised web site,
or host the spammer's DNS, or host the spammer's mailboxes, can take
action -- and by doing so, do rather a lot to disrupt the spammer's
operations. BTW, [some] spammers are shifting tactics away from open
SMTP relays and onto open HTTP (and other) proxies.
But the days when only the spammer's mail account(s) were removed are
over. The days when any network resource attached to a spammer gets
removed are here.
---Rsk
[Please *do not* CC me on replies to messages on this mailing list. Thanks.]
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