...are doing more to help spam than to stop it, in spite of themselves.
consider microsoft-yahoo-aol's big fad of the moment which is suing spammers
and blaming asia. the number one (#1) contributor to spam is open proxies
running on windows/xp, several of which are installed by default as side
effects of other user activities. spam can now come from tens of millions
of untraceable places, and since it's an open proxy rather than an open relay
there isn't even a Received: header trail. WHAT a marketing department,
though, to be able to (successfully!) blame spam on asia.
but what have we here? i would not have imagined that in 2003 any company
could be as blatantly irresponsible as to behave the way telia documents here:
route: 217.208.0.0/13
descr: TELIANET-BLK
remarks: Abuse issues should be reported at
remarks: http://www.telia.com/security/
remarks: Mail to abuse@telia.net will be auto-replied
remarks: and referred to the URL above.
origin: AS3301
mnt-by: TELIANET-RR
changed: rr@telia.net 20010508
source: RIPE
excuse me, telia, but your customers are spamming me, and i have no plans to
teach lartomatic (my homebrew complaintbot) how to log into your web site.
it is the year 2003, and you bloody well need to learn how to accept complaints
about YOUR CUSTOMERS using a format that is most convenient to THE VICTIMS.
(and you should be THANKING US FOR IT since we are DOING YOUR WORK FOR YOU.)
grrrrrrrrrrrrr. clearly i need to stop accepting e-mail from 217.208.0.0/13.
I agree, I was furious as well when I first noticed it. They're doing it
because a lot of people cannot report abuse in the proper way so they're
punishing all of us. What they get out of it is automatic tracing of who
did what when (because the date and IP is in a known format).
Perhaps someone could write a bcp for an email-form that lays out the same
information so we can make the complaints use this format and all abuse
departments can accept using this form, to get some structure to it?
route: 217.208.0.0/13
descr: TELIANET-BLK
remarks: Abuse issues should be reported at
remarks: http://www.telia.com/security/
remarks: Mail to abuse@telia.net will be auto-replied
remarks: and referred to the URL above.
origin: AS3301
mnt-by: TELIANET-RR
changed: rr@telia.net 20010508
source: RIPE
[...]
One would think they'd learn, after AOL blocked them.
> ... it is the year 2003, and you bloody well need to learn how to
> accept complaints about YOUR CUSTOMERS using a format that is most
> convenient to THE VICTIMS. (and you should be THANKING US FOR IT since
> we are DOING YOUR WORK FOR YOU.)
I agree, I was furious as well when I first noticed it. They're doing it
because a lot of people cannot report abuse in the proper way so they're
punishing all of us. What they get out of it is automatic tracing of who
did what when (because the date and IP is in a known format).
how convenient -- for them, that is. however, it is counter to their own
self-interest. as a network owner they need to know about abusive traffic
that comes from their customers. making it hard to report means
(buddabing!) that it won't be as often reported. how can THAT help?
Perhaps someone could write a bcp for an email-form that lays out the same
information so we can make the complaints use this format and all abuse
departments can accept using this form, to get some structure to it?
yow. i first asked that this be done in 1998, and for this very reason
among others. can anybody beat that date (with an earlier one?) this is
a hard problem but with outlook forms and sri-style ascii templates it's
quite achievable. note though that many abusebots will reject MIME since
it might contain a virus. and, there will be huge controversies about
header munging, list cleaning, complaint forwarding, and definitions of
"abuse", "consent", "implied consent", "recourse", and "standing".
so if ``someone'' writes this up, count me as a grateful&willing reviewer.
...are doing more to help spam than to stop it, in spite of themselves.
Paul,
Have You tried to send a mail to abuse@telia.com/net?
I belive the referal in the route object is stale
and should have been taken away long ago. I know
that Telia for a certain time did enforced all
complaints thru the web page. That is not the case
anymore and Abuse @ Telia are accepting reports
the way that they should. I will make sure that
the incorrect information is taken away.
If You have any problems please contact me off
list and I will be glad to help You out.
Not in that report, but on TV last night a M$ spokedroid was quoted as
saying something like "... if Mr. Grainger offers definative proof he is
innocent, we will drop the action."
Erm, I thought that both the US and the UK subscribed to a doctrine of
burden-of-proof on the accuser ?
Let's not forget those little smtp daemons that you can install on your
local machine to bypass your ISP's smtp server. I've actually
installed a couple of them for small clients that needed a mail server
their office could send through because Verizon's smtp server will not
accept an email address that doesn't end with verizon.com. (I digress)
The bottom line is all that email can come from countless thousands of
dynamically addressed broadband ISP client machines. Any PIII or PIV
machine of reasonable speed can send thousands of email messages per
hour. There are lots of email blasting packages out there available for
the download.