Suggestions for a more privacy conscious email provider

Mon Dec 4 14:09:31 UTC 2017

On Monday, 4 December, 2017 04:20, Edwin Pers <EPers at ansencorp.com> wrote:

>As an anecdotal aside, approx. 70% of incoming portscanners/rdp
>bots/ssh bots/etc that hit the firewalls at my sites are coming from
>AWS.

>I used to send abuse emails but eventually gave up after receiving
>nothing beyond "well, aws ip's are dynamic/shared so we can't help
>you"

I tried, once upon a time, to run my private SMTP server as an AWS machine.  What a disaster, even with a rubber band IP or whatever it is they call a static IP assignment.  Tried sending through SES and that was just as bad.  Moved it to a Linode and set up the appropriate DNS including the rDNS delegations and it has been perfectly fine (both on IPv4 and IPv6).  I do recall having to do something to get it to initially work (maybe Linode does some outbound blocking of port 25 -- I don't remember exactly as it was several years ago).

I know of a couple of other folks that run SMTP on Linodes and a couple of big mailing lists as well, all of which seem to work with no problems.  Never had any problems with any listings on any of several hundred DNSbl either.

Plus of course it is a pretty cheap way to get a reliable server (albeit virtual) on decently connected and configured infrastructure.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Rich
>Kulawiec
>Sent: Monday, December 4, 2017 2:27 AM
>To: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: Re: Suggestions for a more privacy conscious email provider
>
>On Sun, Dec 03, 2017 at 05:08:33PM +0000, Filip Hruska wrote:
>> I personally run my own mail server, but route outgoing emails via
>Amazon
>> SES.
>
>Not a good idea.  Amazon's cloud operations are a constant source of
>spam and abuse (e.g., brute-force SSH attacks), they refuse to accept
>complaints per RFC 2142, and -- apparently -- they simply don't care
>to
>do anything about it.  I've had SES blacklisted in my MTA for years
>(among
>other preventative measures) and highly recommend to others.
>
>---rsk

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The fact that there's a Highway to Hell but only a Stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume.