Fingerprinting the World's Mail Servers (O'Reilly) [LWN.net]

Not spam?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 2:29 UTC (Thu) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

If they have a clue (and it sounds as if they do), they're sending precisely zero emails. As they note, MTAs typically announce their identities at connection time. For instance:

mhyre@sandia:~$ telnet debian.org 25 Trying 192.25.206.10... Connected to debian.org. Escape character is '^]'. 220 gluck.debian.org ESMTP Exim 4.50 Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:18:31 -0700 quit 221 gluck.debian.org closing connection Connection closed by foreign host. mhyre@sandia:~$

We just said ``hi'' to the mail server. It told us it's gluck's ESMTP server, running Exim, and we said ``bye''. This isn't spam, just as pinging a host to see whether it's up isn't a portscan attack.

Not spam?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 8:46 UTC (Thu) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link]

No I mean the endgoal, they are targetting mailserver admins with their advertisement crap.

Not necessarily

Posted Jan 11, 2007 16:00 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

They said that their marketing team asked them to help develop a list of targets. They did not say how the target market was reached.

If I were selling a "sendmail compatible product" then it would be quite
reasonable of me to create a list of sendmail users from a list of
companies ... and then to contact them using paper mail or other out-of-band
means.

Also B2B marketing is not "spam" in the normal sense of the term.

While I personally prefer a "don't call us ... we'll find you" business
strategy ... even in my B2B (business-to-business) transactions, it's
hard to be too harsh on one company contacting other companies which are
reasonable prospective customers. ("Reasonable" can be a bit vague ...
but let's allow that for now).

JimD

Sure, but...

Posted Jan 11, 2007 17:14 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

...what else could you expect of a "marketing dept"? These poor bastards have to invent another crap to push down throats, crappy way. OTOH those who are getting hired to produce that crap wouldn't earn their bread without marketing, and those who can both "work by conscience" (as Russians say) *and* get the product to customers are very rare these days.

And sendmail is just about as stinky as basically anything those markedroids would push, so why worry... those concerned have migrated to "sendmail-compatible" postfix ages ago, only insane vendors like Red Hat are still spreading this plague by default. *That* is worth worring about, to some extent.