Re: SPAM was RE: ***TiVo Mailing List - SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT***

["K. C. Li" <li@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Mark Hetherington wrote:

> real address remains available to the increasingly complex harvesting
> systems from the days when SPAM was not the problem it is today.

We had an e-mail address that was briefly used at Network Solutions for
the registration of the domain name. It has never been used anywhere else.
Nearly 8 years later, we are still bouncing incoming e-mails every day
with that address.

> The other advantage of rejection of course, is that should a real
person
> have a message rejected, they are likely to actually read it and if
> important, attempt communication in another manner rather than merely
> assume the message arrived.

Please don't misunderstand. We do reject e-mails and reject them every
second. However, there are many brain dead MTAs that refuse to knowledge
"Unknown user" errors and would attempt to connect every second
trying to
deliver the same e-mail. For these and many persistent spammers (eg.
real-net.net, flowgo.com, quickinspirations.com), we reject their
connection packets at TCP level using our firewall.

All these in addition to the many Windows XP PCs using "home.org"
(one of
the domain names that we handle) as their domain name with automatic
update of DNS. Our DNS servers are routinely rejecting thousands of DNS
update requests every day.

> My sympathy with the inept Systems Administrator was exhausted many
> years ago. It is not difficult to secure a mail server and an
> Administrator incapable of doing so, should not be doing the job. Some

I agree entirely. We are currently getting SMTP connection hits of around
one million every couple of days from servers mainly from Brazil for
bounced spams with a forged domain name of ours as a return address.
Someone has obviously done a few "marketing runs" with a forged
return
address of ours. Worst still, within the past few days, my actual e-mail
address is being used on a number of porno spams which have resulted in
many bounces from servers all over the world. Unfortunately, there is
little I could do about it. To say that I hate spam is an understatement.

> friends of mine, that work in IT services, have actually discovered a
> new business area in securing email servers, since a number of their
> business customers employed a Systems Administrator incapable of the
> task.

They'll have a secure job for a long time to come. Even big names like
BTInternet have incorrectly configured e-mail servers. eg. Invalid HELO.

Regards,

Kwong Li
li@xxxxxxx
Laser Business Systems Ltd.
http://www.laser.com