My ISP has been "blacklisted"!

"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
online.com...
Remember that spammers exist because someone is buying. That tells us the
best way to kill them off: get people to stop buying from spammers.

Unfortunately, since there's practically no scaling cost associated with
sending bulk email, you'd have to eliminate EVERY single spam response to
get rid of it. When their response rate goes down, they just send more
email.

The social solution is a key element, to be sure. But there's always some
sucker out there willing to respond to spam. Stiff laws against the kind of
tactics spammers use are needed, they need to be enforced, and they need to
be passed everywhere, or at least enough places that ISPs can block email
from places known to harbor spammers while still allowing 99% of the users
to receive all of their email from all of their associates.

It's not advertising per se that's the problem. It's the fact that the bulk
of the advertising is being sent by people who don't care whether you are
likely to reply or not, who know that they would get in trouble if they were
found out, and who take steps to cover their tracks. Their anonymity
prevents them from acting responsibly in the (currently) wide-open Internet.

Of course, one day, we'll have an Internet where there's no such thing as
unauthenticated transmissions, and at that point, it will be much easier to
tackle problems like this. Until that day, I agree with you that people
need to stop replying to spam, while I disagree that doing so is the "best
way" to fight spam. Even more, we need to be aggressive about not
permitting the general behavior of spammers in the first place.

Pete

In article , Jeff Franks wrote:
Both of these are "blacklists" that many mailservers use to try to prevent
spamming.

I don't like blacklists for flat rejecting mail. I prefer to use a spam
scoring system - the one I use is called SpamAssassin, and I have it
installed on the mail server for everyone who uses my system to get
email. SpamAssassin assigns scores for each spam indicator - it uses a
combination of its own rules, a Baysean filter, the DCC and the Spamhaus RBL.
Matching a single rule - for example, if your IP address is in the SBL,
won't mean you get put in the spamtrap. For the rules-based filter, you
must match a few rules. SpamAssassin is very effective - much better
than using an RBL alone.

Here's a few stats for my personal email address for how many spam
emails I get per day:

Sat Nov 29 01:00:43 UTC 2003
101
Sun Nov 30 01:00:51 UTC 2003
102
Mon Dec 1 01:00:35 UTC 2003
114
Tue Dec 2 01:00:45 UTC 2003
115
Wed Dec 3 01:00:11 UTC 2003
131
Thu Dec 4 01:00:09 UTC 2003
117
Fri Dec 5 01:00:09 UTC 2003
98
Sat Dec 6 01:00:10 UTC 2003
94
Sun Dec 7 01:01:14 UTC 2003
105
Mon Dec 8 01:00:13 UTC 2003
103

I get perhaps 3 or 4 actual emails from real people per day (excluding
mailing lists). The scale of spam makes me wonder if email is really
worth it any more, since I get two orders of magnitude more spam than
ham. I have to waste time configuring SA, my server has to waste CPU
cycles and disk space.

Then there's worms/viruses. My mail server is configured to point-blank
reject *all* Windows executables. During the recent Swen scourge, at one
point Exim was rejecting several copies of the worm per minute. The
mailserver literally had to reject gigabytes of Swen. Swen must have
brought some smaller ISPs to their knees - I was just processing mail
for a handful of users - just imagine the traffic for a couple of
thousand users!

Unfortunately, the MAPS RBL is not a solution - it's like a blunderbuss
- it's fairly indiscriminate and inaccurate: many false positives and
fairly ineffective blocking. I won't even use the MAPS RBL as a rule for
SpamAssassin.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 16:59:30 -0000, Dylan Smith wrote:

The scale of spam makes me wonder if email is really
worth it any more, since I get two orders of magnitude more spam than
ham.


For those wondering about the name 'SPAM':
http://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html

and to come to an end on this thread: Jay, is your question somehow
answered? *hehe*

#m

--
http://www.declareyourself.com/fyr_candidates.php
http://www.subterrane.com/bush.shtml

Kind of like having the Post Office read your mail before you get it,
just to make sure it's really something you need to see! I'll filter my
own spam, thank you very much!

Jay Honeck wrote:
Many of my emails in response to those of you who have sent me pictures for
the new Rec.Aviation website have been "bouncing back".

When it became obvious that it was NOT "everyone else's" problem, I
contacted Mediacom to inquire about the service. Here is their reply --
anyone care to translate? (What the heck is MAPS and RBL, and why is
MEDIACOM the one that is "blacklisted"?):

Dear Jay,
We have found out that Domains that use the same e-mails servers as
Mediacom, but do not use the same precautions as Mediacom, have been
identified as spammers. Because of this, all other Domains that use MAPS
and RBL to check the validity of our mailserver, have us Blacklisted.

Mediacom has been assured that our mail server will be removed from these
blacklist no later then the first of the week, however it may take up to
another 10 days for all these different domains to update their list and
allow mail to be received into their domain from mchsi.com.

It is advised for all customers to have an updated anti-virus program, and
check their system for Trojans (applet progams sending/receiving
data/e-mail; unsuspecting to user), and possibly a firewall to detect this
traffic.

Also, alot of mailservers are halting all mail to see if it is spam, a
virus, or a suspicious file; thus the delivery or rejection notice could
take up to 3 days for Domains protecting their service.

Randy Jackson

Internet Support Representative
Mediacom Online
(877) 387-8087

On Fri, 05 Dec 2003 16:14:01 +0000, rip wrote:

Kind of like having the Post Office read your mail before you get it,
just to make sure it's really something you need to see! I'll filter my
own spam, thank you very much!

Do you like filtering 300 - 400 spams a day out of your maybe 100 legit emails a day
list? I don't.

I do filter my own email using software here that places email spam
into spam mailboxs, and in the last 50,000 spams only misidentified 1 email
as spam when it wasn't. That is only a 6 month time frame for me. Yes, I
keep spams until I hit 5,000 and delete them, I use it for my filter
training.

Many people have absolutely no clue as to how bad spam really truely is,
it's a HUGE drain on resources and I support any efforts to get rid of the
clogs.

In article . net,
"Matthew P. Cummings" wrote:

Many people have absolutely no clue as to how bad spam really truely is,

and way too many of them are supposed to be running email servers.

:-(

--
Bob Noel

In a previous article, "Matthew P. Cummings" said:
Many people have absolutely no clue as to how bad spam really truely is,

I get 2,000 spams a day (and rising rapidly), not counting the Microsoft
executables that are deleted before the spam filter sees them.


--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Disclaimer: "These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they can be
yours too."

Paul Tomblin wrote:

I get 2,000 spams a day (and rising rapidly), not counting the Microsoft
executables that are deleted before the spam filter sees them.

Wow! I'm only getting about 1% of that.

George Patterson
Some people think they hear a call to the priesthood when what they really
hear is a tiny voice whispering "It's indoor work with no heavy lifting".

In a previous article, "G.R. Patterson III" said:
Paul Tomblin wrote:

I get 2,000 spams a day (and rising rapidly), not counting the Microsoft
executables that are deleted before the spam filter sees them.

Wow! I'm only getting about 1% of that.

Several reasons for that:
1. I've got several domains registered in my name and email address
2. I've got my email address on a bunch of web sites
3. My email is quoted in several Usenet group's FAQs
4. I've had the same email address since 1996, and the email I had before
that is still forwarded to this one.
5. I've also got several "functional" email addresses (news@, webmaster@,
postmaster@) that are forwarded to this one.
6. I post to Usenet far more than I should. I checked recently and Google
had about 10,000 posts from me just at this email address. (do the math -
10,000 posts since 1996, that means about 1500 posts a year, or 4 a day)
7. I've posted to mailing lists that are archived on the web, further
increasing my visibility and vulnerability.

BTW: I get a ton of spam sent to an address that has ONLY been used to
register a domain, not anything else. Unfortunately it's a requirement to
give a real address for registering a domain, so I can't just drop the
whole thing.

I also put a non-existant email address in a comment field on the
http://xcski.com/ web site. It has never been a valid address, nor has it
ever been mentioned on Usenet or in email, and I see spam bouncing off of
it every day. If I knew how, I'd set up something to automatically
blacklist any sender using that address.

--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full
house and four people died. -- Steven Wright

"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message
...


Paul Tomblin wrote:

I get 2,000 spams a day (and rising rapidly), not counting the Microsoft
executables that are deleted before the spam filter sees them.

Wow! I'm only getting about 1% of that.

Is it possible that Comcast is stopping the other 99%? Turning off the
Hotmail filter for a couple of hours is instructive. (despite having had my
HM address in the clear for years, I get maybe 5-10 messages a day leak
through the filter, and no complaints from anyone that I didn't reply to
their mail).

-- David Brooks