<rant>
On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Dave Anderson wrote:
But ISPs do terminate accounts for sending unsolicited emails in any kind
of large number. There is a reason why all spammers have switched to
China.
Some do terminate accounts, but I know first hand that some participate
either via pink contracts or selling their lists. I had an account once
that even my wife didn't know about. I never gave out it's address either,
yet I got spam. And an account like abc1200948388dhf(_at_)isp(_dot_)com is
not a very
guessable account.
Depending on how isp servers are setup it may have been possible to "hack"
into the server and see list usernames. Don't asume they actually "sold"
your email address.
On another occasion I had an ISP that intevened when I sent a nasty gram to
the offending spammer. My ISP, as it turned out was hosting the sammer
inside their netblock.
But then I also had a large ISP that was very good. The moral hear is that
many ISPs are good net-citezens, and others are deceptive trash.
Yes there are good and bad isps, but we do work together to get rid of bad
guys and try to clean up our ranks even if end-users don't see it. And for
example when I see continuing spam from particular isp, I send them note
that if they do not stop the abuse, I'll block their entire net from
accessing my 32,000 ips. You'd be surprised how well this works, I often
receive human response on what had been on or what real situation had
been, so continue the behavior and I end up doing what I promised or
complaining to their upstreams. I know other isps do similar things and
most of good blacklists are run by ISPs.
You can not hope to stop spammer who just signed up today at large isp,
but large spammers rely on pemanent connections and try their best to hide
who they are and where they are sending emails from, these should be our
primary targets for anti-spam propsals (would be nice to have good
statistics on how much email really comes from those 150 large spammers,
but I suspect getting reliable statistics on this is impossible).
Why couldn't a large ISP stop, or perhaps seriously hinder spam? If they
implemented a system where every account could only send 25-100 messages it
would seriously discourage spammers.
Some do, some dont, there are good reasons for either choice.
I suspect the more reputable ISPs do
this, but many don't. There in is where the problems lye. It is up to the
receive, not the sender to verify mail.
Perhaps we (ASRG group) should work on that problem and have both be
responsible for verifying emails and agree how to do it! Any working
solution should involve both source and destination cooperating and ways
to distinguish good source from the bad.
At home, I just block the China spammers outright, using IPFilter I simply
block out the whole IP range and it massively reduces spam. But at work I
need to be more selective. Business people do not understand the smut virus
infected mail came from the same place as a field rep.
Problem with China is actually more on that they are actively hosting
spammer websites despite large number of protests and warnings. This and
other actions (in terms of following internet standards) causes many to
block china outright on the core routers, but there is also growing
concerns that this is all being done on purpose and its "goverment
sponsored" (remeber they control pretty much all ip entrances to
chinanet) actions and they actually do want china blocked from most of
world for political reasons and as a way to suppress access to free press.
</rant>
Any solution needs to be individualized down to the sender and the receiver.
So certs may have a place.
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