Matt
David Daniels wrote:
That's a damn good solution. The ISP can block outbound spam from dynamic connections which stops the trojaned machines and the junior spammers. Your customer gets their mail to your server with no fuss. Well done.
David Daniels
System administrator
Starfish Internet Service
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
----- Original Message ----- From: Scott MacLean <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 8:12 AM Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Outbound Port 25, was -> Virginia Indicts
This may be a crutch solution, but it is what we have implemented, and our customers seem to like it.
I wrote a small port redirection program that runs on the mail server. It listens on a specific port number, and when it receives a connection, opens a connection on the mail server on port 25, and acts as an "intermediary" between the two. Our customers reconfigure their clients to connect on this port number other than 25, it skips around the various ISP's port 25 blocking, they get to use our SMTP server, and noone is the wiser.
At 12:21 AM 12/13/2003, Matthew Bramble wrote:
Dave Doherty wrote:
Matt, I went through a lot of the same arguments with my StarPower
customers. Once they understand that security and spam control
requires that
they use StarPower's SMTP service, they are very cooperative and
happy to
make the adjustments. We are fanatical about customer service,
and I will
have a tech talk a customer through the email setup, even if it
takes an
hour.
I think you are assuming too much about your customers being happy under those arrangements. Maybe your outbound SMTP server is problem free, but the ISP's that are implementing such things are far from problem free in my experience, and I hate getting calls about why someone's E-mail isn't reaching it's destination when we aren't handling their outbound traffic. We also provide virus scanning on outbound traffic, which such a configuration defeats.
I see this approach in the same light as closing down the
highways because people speed. It punishes customers and
providers that play by the rules, whereas only a small number are
sending spam or have computers that are compromised to do so. Because I need direct access to my SMTP server for monitoring, I
absolutely have to have a provider that allows SMTP traffic
through. If the majority of ISP's played by the rules that you
do, SMTP would be broken for all practical purposes as far as I'm
concerned.
If you ask around, most here don't consider blocking on DUL lists
to be a wise thing to do, though using that in a weighting scheme
is a decent idea. It's pretty clear that even Scott is being
blocked by Road Runner's servers because of a poor implementation
of a DUL list that includes his IP space even though it is static
and business-class. Blocking outbound SMTP is even worse than blocking by DUL. I'm
sure that many around here have had similar issues with large
ISP's that improperly have tagged their IP space as being dynamic.
I know that this practice negatively affects my business, and
it's quite difficult to explain to a non-technical customer why
this is, and never once has one of them been happy that their ISP
has chosen to do so. Maybe you aren't aware of this affecting your business, but I,
along with several of my LAN integrator friends, would absolutely
not recommend an ISP that blocks outbound SMTP traffic because of
the problems that it causes me, and the perception that such an
implementation is a lazy way of fighting spam. And as far as my
experience goes, none of the ISP's doing this that I have
encountered went about this in a fully responsible manner. They
all chose to make a change and then have me take the calls and do
the diagnosis and call them for verification instead of alerting
their customers as to the issues.
This also starts encroaching into the areas of censorship and
policing ones customers. Once you start getting involved with
disallowing SMTP, you remove legitimate objections to blocking
file sharing networks, and could even make yourself liable for
such things. The industry has taken a very purposeful approach
to this by usurping as much responsibility as possible. They
don't want to become the Internet's police force, and costly
defenses of John Doe's by places like Yahoo and Verizon were not
intended to protect criminals, but instead to protect their
businesses from liability and burden. The RIAA has even gone
after universities for file sharing, and this implicates the
universities as being liable for the actions of their students. If you know anything about public colleges, then you should know
that they generally have a huge aversion to any form of blocking
because of the implications. After one student at my old school
got arrested for child porn, a friend of mine who was the sys
admin, removed all such groups from their news server, figuring
that it wouldn't make for good publicity if they found the guy
got it off of their own servers...well, when the guy's boss got
wind of this, he forced him to add all of the groups back in. The view here is that it was a can of worms that they wanted
nothing to do with as a proactive measure, and their job was not
to enforce either moral standards nor the law itself.
Spam is of course a serious problem, and one of the problems is that it causes ISP's to limit access to my servers by my own clients. I assure you that I am not the only one that feels this way, and it does affect your business, though maybe not measureably...it certainly affects mine and I'm not the one blocking this stuff.
Matt
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