17 Jun
2004
17 Jun
'04
10:56 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great der Mouse once stated:
Well, a large web hosting company here in Boca Raton, Florida (where my
girlfriend works as tech support) put in some new anti-spam
measures---basically, if the reverse DNS doesn't exist, or it's in one of
the black lists (don't know which ones they use) the mail is rejected
outright. The switch over was last week.
They're still backlogged with email support issues ("I'M LOOSING
MAIL!!!!!!! WHATS WRONG WITH YOU IDIOTS?!?!?! MY FRIEND ISN'T A SPAMMER!
AND YOU'RE REJECTING HIS/HER/ITS EMAIL!") to the point where *everybody* (up
to managers) are on the phones and answering email.
Granted, they handle a tremendous amount of email (it's a huge facility,
hundreds of machines, thousands upon thousands of sites) so the strain of
the mail servers is incredible (they had to shut them down for 12 hours last
week, just to let things settle down).
If I were running an ISP I might be hesitant to implement some of the
measures, simply due to support issues alone.
Most ISPs seem to be drowning in a sea of spam
these days and
completely overloaded - at least they are over here.
I've always wondered, when I see such things. I can easily name a
half-dozen simple technical measures that will _drastically_ cut the
incoming spam load to a mailserver. They're all fairly well known,
even. Yet ISPs refuse to implement them, usually citing the "but it
might refuse legitimate mail!" mantra, apparently preferring to lose
legitimate mail randomly and silently to overload than to lose
legitimate mail obviously and controlledly to filters, a mindset I just
don't get - especially since the "legitimate" mail that will be lost is
all defective to at least some extent already (because such defects are
what the filters test for). A good example is sleep-before-banner. It kills an
awful lot of
ratware dead, is difficult at best for them to adapt to, and won't kill
anyone who bothers to pay attention to the minimum timeouts specified
in RFCs 1123 and 2821. I've seen it said that as little as 15 seconds
is effective (I use 90).
That, however, is a good idea. Might do that myself.
-spc (Didn't hear of that one ... )