SPAM, IEMMC, and Caller ID

Brian Moore bem at cmc.net
Thu Oct 30 02:17:11 UTC 1997


> Incidentally, Mr. Lawlor, if you really *are* participating in this
> discussion because you are interested in lowering the level of spam that
> gets dumped on the Net on a daily basis, I commend you for your change of
> heart. Those of us who frequent the news.admin.net-abuse newsgroups would
> be quite proud of you.

I have mixed feelings.

I have had AGIS representatives (including Adam Hersh) tell me that I was
forging the spam I received, since their spammers would never break the rules.

When I said "Excuse me?" he watered it down to "well, most of the complaint
mail we get is forged... it complains about spam that was never sent."

I've had mailbombings from CyberPromo customers using my domain name to sneak
past AOL's filters, generating thousands of bounces into my postmaster box. 
When I called AGIS's NOC to report it, an AGIS employee told me that after
asking on five seperate occasions for copies of the spam, that he'd received
none, and that AGIS was filtering most of their mail to discard anything that
had the word 'spam' or 'US Code 47' and other such strings in it.  I should
call back in the morning when Adam could change the filters to let my mail
through.

I had AGIS employees tell me that the person who sent the above spam (whose
name, it was pointed out to me was in the copies of the Cyberpromo password
file posted to Usenet) was not a Cyberpromo customer when he had a working
autoresponder at Cyberpromo.  Seems despite me asking them repeatedly to try
it, they never bothered.  Instead, they called Sanford Wallace who told them
"um, no, he's not mine!".

And now, of course, I see AGIS is peering news with a site that has been
spewing 16k posts a day into Usenet that refuses to stop.  Following standard
practice of alerting peers to a probable UDP is impossible considering that any
such complaint to AGIS is no doubt (as has been confirmed by AGIS employees)
auto-discarded.

AGIS has a lot of sins in the past, and despite Mr Lawlor's posts here, I find
they still have a long way to go before they can be considered a productive
member of the Internet. 

Mr Lawlor's insistence on a technical solution to a people-problem is typical
of the same old sidestepping he's been doing for months.

I can positively identify spam coming from Sanford Wallace.  Weee.  So what
does that do for stopping spam?  Sandy will change to relaying through servers
that don't digitally sign mail... and I either have to discard all mail from
any source that isn't signed or get his spew.

And then he'll change to using disposable dialups... wow, I can see
'jb12783 at bellatlantic.net' is today's cyberpromo alias.  It'll be digitally
signed so I can be sure.  Again, that offers me no benefit.

What Mr Lawlor is arguing is that we should all have "white list mail" where we
list the people whom we accept mail from and discard anything else.  And that
we should verify the identity of the sender against that white list.

That is the world that he lives in, where the mail to anyone at AGIS is most
likely discarded and complaints left unheard.  It is NOT the sort of world I
want to live in.

Despite your recent predeliction for posting, Mr. Lawlor, I fear you have not
changed.  You are still arguing that I should have to protect myself from the
thieves and vandals that you service and that you don't care if they abuse my
services.

It's a new wrapper on the same old AGIS song and dance and I'm not impressed.




More information about the NANOG mailing list