anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?

Forrest W. Christian forrestc at imach.com
Sat May 4 00:23:38 UTC 2002


On Fri, 3 May 2002, Scott Granados wrote:

> deal with spam is.  Honestly sure I get it like everyone else, in some
> of my accounts more than others but I also get a real truckload in my
> snailmail box.  Just as with all the pottery barn catalogs <no offense
> to pottery barn I guess>:) I have a delete key just like my trash can.
> I know at one time the argument was made, and quite correctly that
> people were paying to receive this service and these messages cost them
> money. Today with flat rate access and many people not paying on a per
> packet basis it seems to me that the responsibility lies with the end
> user to filter properly and or dress that delete key.  I always shut
> down customers who spam and disrupt service simply because I don't want
> the backlash or want specific ips blocked but in a way I don't feel its
> right that the carriers do the filtering it seems tome up to the end
> user.

Let me put this into real world terms.

I run a mail server (among other things) with about 4000 mailboxes, and
about 40,000 messages a day.

over 85% of all mail on average is marked as spam by spamassasin on this
mail server.

I, late last year, had to upgrade it to a multiprocessor box with
gigabytes of memory, striped raid 0+1, etc. etc. etc. to handle the load.

I could have used a mail server only 15% of the size of this one.  Or
better put, I could have used a 300mhz pentium III box with low-end IDE
drives and a modest amount (256MB) of memory instead of the Dual PRocessor
6-SCSI 2GB ram thing we are running now.

Add to that the 8-10 hours a week we spend cleaning up messes related to
spammers who decide that sending 50,000+ messages as fast as they can to
us is a good thing.   For instance, on thursday of last week, we took
almost 5000 messages in about a hour from one spammer in particular.  The
mail server *can't* handle this load so it basically was a Denial of
Service attack.

Right now there are 5000 messages in our mail queue which are spam bounces
which aren't being accepted by the spammer's mail server.

I could go on and on and on and on.

I might be more inclined to tolerate the spammers if they weren't bad net
citizens.  They forge their email addressses so they can't receive
bounces.  They don't have any consideration about the load they are
placing on the remote mail server (I've seen 40 streams open at once to my
mail server from the same class C - all injecting mail as fast as
possible).   And on and on and on.

- Forrest W. Christian (forrestc at imach.com) AC7DE
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Home of PacketFlux Technogies and BackupDNS.com         (406)-442-6648
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