On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 at 17:36 GMT, ScruLoose penned:
And if you really want to start annoying spammers, go do a google search on teergrubing. This likewise only applies if you're running your own mailserver.
Okay, I keep seeing this term, so I finally did look it up.
http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/usenet/teergrube.en.html
I wonder what the legal ramifications are, as well as wondering how likely it would be that teergrubing would result in retaliation that would saturate my bandwidth and make my ISP very unhappy with me (not to mention rendering my net access unusable).
I'm not sure how I feel about this sort of vigilante behavior. I'm not saying I disapprove -- I'm saying I haven't decided.
Anyone have opinions, thoughts, experiences they can share?
I haven't implemented a teergrubing system yet, but I have read about the implementation and I am not worried about the bandwidth. Some mail transfer agents (MTA) such as postfix already have options to slow down if the sending program is trying to give commands too fast.
When the SMTP sender gives a command, it sends a few bytes via TCP and then waits for the SMTP reciever to give a response. It is probable that they are mailing a huge system doing some LDAP/database lookup for the user address (except for the lame huge ones that accept all mail and then post-SMTP bounce...). While it waits, there is no SMTP tcp traffic until the SMTP reciever responds. If the reciever responds with a small amount of data that indicates 'more to come' the SMTP sender would keep waiting.
http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/usenet/teergrube.en.html
When I get around to implementing teergrubing, I intend to have it based off of a ip list, or even better the number of RBL type services that the address is listed with. I wouldn't want to make my list mail take any longer, nor would my employer be happy to know that I'd effectivly slowed down all incoming email.
I would imagine that if the practice of teergrubing becomes wide-spread, spamming software will just disconnect and move on if the responses take "too long" or send "too many" continuation lines (some percentage or deviation above the average). If they started doing that, the hope to help stop their spamming of others would be discouraged, but the spammers may start keeping lists of teergrubers and avoid spamming them. :)
-- Jacob
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