[CS-FSLUG] My analysis of the email spam problem

[Ed Hurst]

The standards are no set by folks like you and I. They are established
by network technicians over the years discussing it and coming to terms.
If the "powers that be" refuse to listen, it is *they* who are violating
standards. The Internet is a web of trust, and the agreed standards of
those who together have defacto control is *the* standard we must all
live with. In this case, the blocklist advocates are the largest single
"block" of technicians. They rule in that sense, because no other
indentifiable group is as large and powerful.

> It is true that many mailservers bounce email which appears to come
> via a dialup connection; however I don't agree that this is "correctly
> bounced."

Nobody with dialup has any reason to send direct-to-MX. It most
certainly *is* correctly bounced. This is a primary means to blocking
spam. That's the standard.

> What this means is that unless you know how to get reverse dns which
> doesn't look like a dialup connection, you can't reliably send
> legitimate bulk email.  Suppose for example that you're organising a
> conference, and want to send an email message to everyone who has
> registered for the conference.  You can't send these emails directly
> to the recipients' mailservers, because so many will bounce or even
> silently discard it.  And if you try to send them through your ISP's
> mailserver, the messages might get bounced or dropped there because
> ISPs need to be wary of the risk of getting their mailservers
> blacklisted.

I don't quite follow you, but I do know this: Legitimate bulkmailers
will pay for a proper mailserver registration with reverse DNS. That's
the standard. Legitimate bulkmailers will also know better than to
obtain service from disreputable providers who harbor spammers.

> My impression is that IP-based blacklists have been tried,
> extensively, some with the SPEWS-like "shotgun" approach, others
> with more careful rules.  As far as I can see, the experience is
> that this approach doesn't work well enough.

Your impression is sadly mistaken. It works exceedingly well to those
who subscribe, but there are some false positives. The moral high ground
is to create your own list, or use lists with a better standard. SPEWS
is widely known, which is why I chose their name, but they are not the
best example.

> Alas, this has the effect that service providers establish rules and
> procedures which harm senders of legitimate bulk email.

The consensus of the blocklisters is that no legitimate bulkmailer has
anything to fear. Many of the activists have their own legitimate bulk
mail operation.

> The internet has (IMO fortunately) no "root server" with the power of
> causing someone's traffic to "go nowhere".  (There are DNS root-servers
> but they don't have this power.)

Just an expression. There is a website that uses that term as if the
operators of the "backbone" were running "root servers". As I
understand, they are among other things the combined authoritative DNS
servers for all the Internet. Yes, the Internet could probably keep
working if all these went down, but nowhere near as fast.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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