Lawsuit threat against RBL users

Fri Nov 20 06:23:00 UTC 1998

At 10:59 PM 11/19/98 -0500, Steven J. Sobol wrote:
>On Thu, Nov 19, 1998 at 03:25:25PM -0800, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
>> Ah, but there's the problem and Karl D. is right. The *real* answer is to
>> do away with throw-away accounts. Yes, the provider of the throw-away
>> account knows exactly who the spammer is (I won't go any deeper than that),
>> they have a CC number. If that data matches our customer, that customer
>> becomes $1500US poorer and stops being our customer. Tracing a spam to a
>> particular dail-in port is not easy, but it's do-able. You then know who
>> the provider is/was.
>
>It's actually not that hard for a smallish provider like NACS. I imagine
>the big dialup wholesale outifts would have quite a bit more work to do,
>though.

Actually, it is somewhat easier for them. I have it on good authority that
the mail admin at AOL gets regular detailed traces from SPAM-L and other
private sources. Many of the SPAM complaints not only come with detailed
headers, but traceroutes as well. NetCom also benefits from their users in
this way. All that is required is to verify the analysis as being valid,
check the logs, and move on from there.

___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) 
e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer at mhsc.com>rmeyer at mhsc.com
Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com
Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/
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