Re: fix.your.open.relay.or.die.net -- MIDRANGE-L

    Well, my understanding of the issue affecting Nathan is a little
different. The die.net guys simply delay processing of attempts to
deliver email to phony addresses on their sites. The addresses are
constructs placed on web pages and thus only used when a spider steals
them for use by spammers.

    So the only time your machine should be affected is when CPU is
being soaked by your SMTP job attempting to deliver spam email to their
domain.

    I agree with you that black holing addresses that appear to have
open relay might seem a bit over zealous and could certainly be
inconvenient. It is particularly heavy handed when it can affect your
email as much as when eliminating an entire domain like aol, msn,
earthlink, etc. It might also be that AOL considers it abusive that
people allow their machines to be used to relay spam which is flooded to
AOL users. Especially when AOL must then store the gigabytes of email
that their users will later complain to them about.

    So maybe there isn't a really happy making solution to that. But the
die.net contribution seems to be positive, since it seems it will only
affect those machines trying to spam.

Brad Jensen wrote:

>
>Chris Rehm wrote:
>
>>I don't suppose you'd have an idea who was spamming via your machine, do
>>you?
>>
>
>Actually, you do not have to have anyone use you as a spam relay
>to be targeted by the ORB zealots. (I guess it is clear where I
>stand on this issue.)
>
>They probe your system to see if it can realy SMTP - which all
>systems that follow the RFCs do, by the way. In other words, if
>your system works correctly, they black hole list you. Then
>other people write their mail servers to read the black hole
>list, and if you are on it, they don't accept your mail. Even if
>it is an individual email.
>
>Basically these guys are terrorists who have hijacked the
>internet RFC process. The real solution is to password protect
>SMTP connections, the same as POP3. Meanwhile some vigilantes
>have found a horse they can ride.
>
>meanwhile they have caused far more damage to the internet than
>any saving they could hope to make. basically you have to
>reconfigure your smtp server to refuse connections except from
>inside your local net and a few selected ips. If you can't dial
>in and get your mail on the road, this is why.
>
>We eneded up putting a couple of 800 number dialins to our
>server, so we bypass the net to pick up mail. Pretty stupid, but
>it works.
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>Brad Jensen brad@elstore.com
>President
>Electronic Storage Corporation Tulsa OK USA
>918-664-7276
>
>LaserVault Report Retrieval & Data Mining
>www.Laservault.com
>
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--
Chris Rehm
javadisciple@earthlink.net

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart...
...Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other
commandment greater than these. Mark 12:30-31