amazonaws.com?

Mon May 26 07:58:37 UTC 2008

On 26/05/2008 09:17 Barry Shein wrote:
> It's since stopped, thank you, but a few here indicated, and I don't
> know if they speak with any authority, that Amazon seems to believe
> that so long as their cloud machines are in blacklists then they
> shouldn't have to feel any responsibilty to exercise any control over
> them vis a vis spammers et al.

You are speaking a bit hyperbolically and that is not what anyone 
believes or feels.

Much like any large datacenter or hosting provider it is not feasible 
to police every packet in and out of the network, I assume "The World" 
has lots of experience with super-scale networks so I'll limit my 
"lecturing" on the subject.

Regardless, like any large datacenter or hosting provider they can 
only respond to complaints when they get them, and they do, and they 
respond (unless you have evidence to suggest the contrary). As a 
corollary to this I was simply noting that their terms do not include 
the ability to SMTP at all and as such the ranges are left in any 
blacklists they might fall into. You are also free to block them for 
SMTP on your own kit given this directive. Blocking at RCPT time or 
even before limits any bandwidth usage from spam to negligible amounts 
in most cases.

The consequences of blocking TCP/25 as an upstream though is much 
worse since customers frown on upstream port filtering and it makes 
SMTP impossible for everything except those which accept the 
submission port. Many people may still have numerous valid reasons for 
using port 25 to talk to their own kit somewhere else.

-- 
Colin Alston ~ http://syllogism.co.za/
"To the world you may be one person, to one person you may be the 
world" ~ Rachel Ann Nunes.