On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Robert M. Hyatt wrote:
> would you say this is yet another good reason that 'anonymous remailers'
> ought to be put out of business, completely?
Well, they can be now by configuring things carefully. The problem is
the eighty zillion sites that have little or no SPAM control because
they have semi-amateur management in the first place.
The really interesting thing in the last year or so has been watching
the SPAMers adopt several of the techniques used by crackers --
address/forwarding breakouts, forged message headers, even actual cracks
with addressing/forwarding processes run on the sly -- to push their
wares. Or is it warez...
All they have to do is find an ISP or poorly run corporate mail host
that doesn't control mail forwarding and use it to pump out their stuff.
I found out the hard way that they're doing the header forging because I
got SPAM from an MIT site that was forwarded because the spammers had
forged the message so it appeared to originate from an MIT list (and
hence made it through their filters).
All of this, of course, is against acceptable use policies signed by
customers on virtually any ISP (or by the ISP with their gateway/POP
provider on the Internet backbone). If you can find the ISP providing
the POP for the actual vendor website and bitch there, you might get
some results. Remember, they can't sell anything if they provide no
means at all for contact, and ANY means of internet contact is going to
leave a trail to their POP. The really bad ones are the ones with just
an 800 number. A couple of address breakouts and one can really never
trace them back to their point of origin.
rgb
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
