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Re: Mudslicking to counter SPAM (was TARPIT)



kraehe@copyleft.de said:
>   Relays are !NOT! innocent, they are so bad administrated, that they
>   relay SPAM. Those sites deserve to become reinstalled. 

They need to be sorted.  DOSing them is probably not a reasonable 
answer, although we may disagree on this.  Continuing that specific 
point is likely to be a religious war so I will respond no more on it.

Additionally some of the bounces will be coming from end systems not 
involved in the relaying and completely innocent other than being 
targetted as spam recipients.  The numbers argument below applies to 
them in orders of magnitude.

The *specific* example that was presented was one system that holds the 
domain which is being used as the (forged) sender address for spam runs 
through multiple relays.

There are multiple relays sending out spam.  There is one of your 
machine.  Your box is receiving bounces for non-existant spam recipient 
addresses from those relays.   Attempting teergrubing is going to mean 
that each of those relay boxes has a bunch of connections open to your 
box.  Now tell me who dies first in this scenario.  Even if you manage 
to take out one of the relays (and these are of course a set of moving 
targets), they will be back at you in far too short a time.

You will do better to just RBL those hosts out completely - however 
whether you can do this is a political issue on what level of anti-spam 
regime you can take.

Your mudslicking approach is an example of a social/legal/political 
answer to the problem - which you may recall is exactly what I 
suggested needed to be done in my original message.

I would be very wary about transgressing libel laws in these cases - 
many ISPs have more lawyers than clues.

	Nigel.
-- 
[ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ]
[ Nigel Metheringham                  Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]



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