Re: Please ignore ...

On Thu, 1 May 2008 02:55:10 -0400 (EDT)
Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, 1 May 2008, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
>
> > Whenever I see one of those I simply blackhole the server sending them.
>
> Ah, the ever popular vigilante spam method. What if the message is coming
> from, say, gmail.com, and it's getting routed so that you're not sure
> which account is originating it? Do you blackhole everybody on *that*
> server just because there's one idiot?

Well, I actually do block gmail groups on another list that is
gatewayed to a newsgroup due to the volume of spam that originates from
there but in this case my experience has been that it is done by a
service. For example, I reject all email from spamarrest.com. There
is nothing I want to see from them.

> This is the same problem on a smaller scale. It's not clear which account
> is reponsible, and I believe I saw that there are other people using the
> same ISP who also subscribe to the list. That's why Marc is testing who
> the guilty party is rather than unsubscribing everyone there.

Of course. If someone is running it on a server independent of the ISP
that's a different story. However, it is pretty hard to run that code
on most ISPs without the cooperation of the ISP. That's why there are
companies like SpamArrest. People who run their own server and are in
a position to do this themself tend to also be smart enough to
understand why it is a bad idea.

On the other hand, this type of thing is no different than spam and in
this day and age every ISP, no matter how big, has a responsibility to
deal with spammers on their own system and if they don't they deserve
to be blocked just like any other spam-friendly system.

The fact that Marc has to run this test and does not immediately know
who the guilty party is suggests to me that they are using a service. I
never saw the offending message myself so perhaps it is coming from
SpamArrest and I just rejected the email on my SMTP server.

--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy(at)druid(dot)net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.