Open relays and open proxies

Will Yardley william+nanog at hq.dreamhost.com
Fri Apr 25 18:35:16 UTC 2003


On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 07:59:00AM +0100, Neil J. McRae wrote:

> > SpamCop, for all the criticism it gets, DOES report abused proxies
> > quickly and with great reliability - far more reliably in the case
> > of proxies than, say, the human victims of the abuse.
 
> Pity that spamcop spams people.

Perhaps you could be more vague here?

There have been a number of spam threatening to be from SpamCop:
http://spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/124.html

These emails are pretty clearly not from SpamCop. 

If you're talking about the actual reports sent by SpamCop, they are
not unsolicited, because they're going to abuse and / or role accounts
(and are thus solicited implicitly). If you don't want to receive
SpamCop reports, I'm almost certain you can ask them not to send you
reports.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 12:17:19AM -0700, Christopher J. Wolff wrote:

> The spamcop complaints that really set me off are the "spamvertised
> website" complaints.  Just the mere fact that you host a site
> that was advertised by spam enjoins you in the spamcop chain of
> causation, even if the spam mail did not originate from your
> network.

Not sure if you're trolling here, but spamvertised sites are against
most providers' AUPs, and should be terminated -- spammers don't care
if the account used to send UBE is disabled, but they do care about
keeping the site up long enough to make some money.

Obviously there are *some* cases that SpamCop reports incorrectly
(for instance, Traffic Magnet type spam where the customer's site is
mentioned in the spam), but these are *usually* due to user error.

While I may take some SpamCop complaints with a grain of salt (due to
past complaints that have proved to be false and / or accidental),
for the most part, SpamCop's logic is better than any other automated
reporting tool, and better than a human that doesn't know much about
email headers. Compared to the other false / accidental reports, spam,
viruses and other crap that hits our abuse and role accounts, SpamCop
isn't that bad - at least it lets you ask to receive no further
reports (if you're an innocent bystander or if you've already taken
action), and comes in a consistent, easy to identify and read, format.

I've seen a few cases where SpamCop misidentified the origin of a
message, but they were usually due to some sort of temporary glitch -
for the most part, their system works surprisingly well.

-- 
"Since when is skepticism un-American?
Dissent's not treason but they talk like it's the same..."
(Sleater-Kinney - "Combat Rock")





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