Re: SPAM

[Sis <sis@tio.net>]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Robert H. Clugston wrote:

> My customers keep getting hit with spam messages addressed to my domain.
>...
> 	What can I do to stop these messages from coming in. Is there anything to
> help stop the flow of unsolicited commercial e-mails?

   I wasn't going to respond to this, but then i came up with a question. 
But i'm sorry i deleted the responses to this message so i can't quote
them. Here's my paraphrase of the responses: 
--- begin paraphrase ---
   One person said that we should use the Black Hole list. Someone else
said the list is a DoS and that the ORBS people never called to let his
customer know he was on the list.
--- end   paraphrase ---

   Well, i was black holed and it wasn't pleasant. But i was notified by
e-mail first, and so i was forced to get off my butt and do those
anti-relay changes to my sendmail (in my case i had to upgrade to a
version of sendmail from the latest quarter of the internet era! :)! I
don't think they were "nice" to me, but they certainly got my attention
... and i changed my behaviour. Now i'm not relaying and i can get
righteously indignant at those who do. :)

   So my question is, with all the scanning ability of people around here,
why can't someone (or a group) just go through the whole IP address space
testing for relays and make a "definitive" black hole list? I haven't done
any calculations, but i can't imagine that a distributed project like that
could take more than a month (blue sky estimate there) for a first pass
that would then just need to be incrementally updated. We could even be
"nice" and e-mail everyone that wound up failing the list and give them
another month to upgrade before actually being listed. 

   Maybe i'm being really naive. Maybe my estimate of the size of the
project is crazy? Maybe this is more of an invasion of privacy then i can
think of? Any thoughts on this? 

sis