SPEWS?

Fri Jun 21 08:45:03 UTC 2002

On Thu 20 Jun 2002 (15:51 -0400), Sandy Harris wrote:
> 
> Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 14:33:18 EDT, Sandy Harris <pashley at storm.ca>  said:
> > 
>>>>> If the offending ISP does not respond, and you have exhausted all avenues
>>>>> available to you to get the ISP to get its customer to stop spamming -
>>>>> whether by TOS'ing the customer, education or whatever -
>>>
>>> ... and you've waited a reasonable time ...
>>>
>>> Then the ISP is obviously either incompetent or deliberately aiding the
>>> spammers. Why should you even consider anything less than blacklisting
>>> every netblock the ISP has?
>> 
>> What do you do if the ISP says "We want to turn them off, but they've managed
>> to get a restraining order preventing us"?  We've seen THAT before....
> 
> Then the part above about
> 
>>>>> If the offending ISP does not respond, ...
> 
> obviously does not apply. They are responding. You clearly do not even consider
> blacklisting them.
> 
> You might ask them for help in blacklisting exactly the spammer's addresses.

All this sounds very nice. But:

If the only way to contact SPEWS is via postings in a newsgroup, an
ISP may find themselves unable to make any meaningful response (there
are issues of customer confidentiality, business considertaions, a
whole lot of reasons that an ISP might not wish to discuss the alleged
wrongoings of one of its customers, the measures which it has or might
take or the details of contractual relationships or legal advice they
have received. So all of this is really irrelevant to the topic at
hand. 

An anonymous group using unknown criteria, however well motivated, is
not useful. And any mail administrator who uses their lists is, in my
opinion, a fool.

-- 
Jim Segrave           jes at nl.demon.net