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List:       spamassassin-users
Subject:    Re: spamcop.net tactics
From:       Russell Miller <rmiller () duskglow ! com>
Date:       2005-11-21 18:18:50
Message-ID: 200511211018.50859.rmiller () duskglow ! com
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On Monday 21 November 2005 10:11, Amos wrote:
> I must say I'm not particularly thrilled about the tactics employed by
> SpamCop. At a university it is sometimes difficult to control every
> single thing that everybody does on campus, unless of course perhaps
> if this was a complete authoritarian state. We try hard to control and
> minimize spamming events, but alas, sometimes they happen.
>
> Just recently we discovered we've been tagged by spamcop. Since the
> spamtrap is "secrete", there's no way to know what incident triggered
> this event, which makes it pretty damn difficult to track it down to
> try to deal with it. Furthermore, a site has only one chance to delist
> their server. After that, it's a permanent block.
>
> So, if we can't tell what source is a problem, only have one chance to
> delist--EVER--seems to me we're pretty screwed. Lovely.
>
Seems to me like setting up a firewall or network logger should make it pretty 
easy to see what is sending out inordinate amounts of traffic on port 25.  Or 
you could just block port 25 outgoing as a matter of policy and force people 
to go out through the university mail servers.  No one should be sending 
email directly from a residential machine anyway.

It may be difficult either politically or technically, but it's not spamcop's 
job to police your network for you.  It's spamcop's job to help its customers 
deal with *their* spam problem - that you're apparently (if unwittingly) 
helping to cause.

University networks are pretty well known to be swiss cheese as far as 
security goes.  Yours is probably no exception.  Fix that problem and your 
spam problem should be fixed along with it.

--Russell

-- 

Russell Miller - rmiller@duskglow.com - Agoura Hills, CA
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