Re: [Fwd: Meta-issue: recent spam surge]

[Derrick Norris]

On Wednesday 24 October 2001 01:04 pm, Greg A. Woods wrote:

<snip>

> ORBZ and ORDB both provide verifiable, mechanical only, listings of
> proven open relays.  Both have quite reasonable update times and are
> easy to get de-listed from once you've fixed your mailer.  Osirusoft's
> list is somewhat more comprehensive, but can be tuned by using the value
> of the A RR returned; and they are the only list actively maintaining
> ranges of dialup and other dynamically addressed ports which are never
> sources of legitimate authorised SMTP connections.

My main box at home runs FreeBSD and is configured to use local sendmail for 
outgoing because some of the other lists I subscribe to used to bounce my 
messages due to brain-damaged ISP not having reverse DNS for their 
mailservers, while reverse DNS on their dialup and DSL accounts works.  This 
makes me a "dynamically addressed port" which _is_ a source of "legitimate 
authorised SMTP connections."  Or so I would think, since those lists stopped 
bouncing my messages after I switched to my own sendmail.

I have always thought that blacklisting ISP dialup etc. ports was a bad idea 
-- those not running Windows are often prevented from using all the services 
their OS provides due to attempts to block spam.  I am responsible for 
disposing of the junk snail mail I receive and I consider that more of a pain 
than setting up filters on my BSD box and basically forgetting about it, 
while the number of messages in my trash can each day tells me that external 
spam-blocking attempts aren't working very well.

I personally would rather see a spam hit a list occasionally, rather than 
have a legitimate user post bounced and followed up by a post asking why 
which starts a thread about the whole thing again.  That can be a worse hit 
on signal-to-noise ratio than the spam itself.

Derrick