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Problem with your 'Solution'Problem with your 'Solution'Posted May 6, 2004 5:29 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Problem with your 'Solution' by yodermk Parent article: 82% of email is spam a zombie is a users machine that has been taken over by the bad guys. get a few thousand machines controlled by worms to each send a few dozen messages and you have a system that won't trigger any alarms at any one ISP. also what happens to mailing lists? I have a low bandwidth DSL line to my mail server (144k IDSL, the only thing I can get to my location) if I sendd a message to the linux-kernel mailing list do I now have several tens of thousands of people trying to download the message over my slow link? what happens if the senders server is down or unreachable when I want to read the message? this idea would work in a world where everyone has pleanty of bandwidth and storage and everything is always up, but in the real world it's little better then a dream to toy with. some good may come of it, but this is nowhere near being a deployable system.
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Problem with your 'Solution' Posted May 6, 2004 8:13 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415) [Link] Do you have an ISP?You get them to store the mail. Normal caching strategies also work. The mail you send would be stored in the same place the mail you receive is stored today.
You need to allow for people running there own servers Posted May 6, 2004 10:30 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link] You don't always want an ISP to process your mail. I run a mail server of my cable modem because I host several domains and mailing lists. Its cheaper to use my system at home where I have control rather than pay an ISP for stuff I can do myself.
You need to allow for people running there own servers Posted May 6, 2004 11:51 UTC (Thu) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link] Unfortunately for this kind of mail system, one of the most effective means of blocking spam is to see if it comes directly from the kind of d IP address generally allocated to broadband users, by doing a PTR DNS lookup on the IP and looking for distinctive patters ( e.g. 4 numbers between . Addresses in this category are already getting into a number of DNS blacklists, and if more people get sufficiently fed up with spam to adopt this solution, legitimate mail systems hanging on this kind of connection without using a smart host are likely to become collateral damage. You would avoid this by configuring your ISPs outgoing SMTP server as your outgoing smart host, which would avoid this problem, and make better use of your limited bandwidth (only 1 copy of each list message uses your uplink).
You need to allow for people running there own servers Posted May 6, 2004 23:21 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] Get a virtual server to run your mail server. More expensive than running it over a cable modem? Yeah, but you can afford it. And as another reply said, running SMTP over a cable modem isn't reliable anyway, since they tend to get blacklisted.
Problem with your 'Solution' Posted May 6, 2004 19:08 UTC (Thu) by shapr (subscriber, #9077) [Link] These are actually part of the advantages of this system.If a zombie sends notifications, it must be at the same hostname or IP for them to be picked up. that also means that blacklists become much more effective when a server is 'accountable' for its actions. As for mailing lists, I think the list host would pick up and then host the mail, allowing for pushed spam. But then this isn't a silver bullet, just an improvement. Right, once a mail is in the system it's trusted and pushed. The cost of storing and delivering mails is on the system, not the sender. If you move those costs to the sender, spam becomes less economically viable. The essence is that you and I pay for spam in a push system like we have now, and we only pay for notifications in im2000. One major advantage here is that those most likely to respond to spam, namely Internet newbies who check their mail once a week, are much less likely to get spam, since geeks like us will have gotten a spammed notify, and had time to do something about it (update blacklist, remove virus, etc). Anyway, that's just my take on how to make spam less profitable for the spammers.
Problem with your 'Solution' Posted May 6, 2004 23:19 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] Ok, by that definition of zombie, IM2000 would mostly stop it, if not totally. In most cases, it would have to provide the IP address of the compromised box in order to "work", and the box would have to run a mail server, and not have a firewall. That kind of thing would be easy to detect, but of course I suppose a few idiots will let it go on unnoticed. And a compromised box IP would likely be blacklisted quickly.With the distributed blacklist (assuming it is administered in a trustworthy manner) would almost certainly make the cost to spam way too high. As for mailing lists, the protocol changes somewhat drastically. See Bernstein's site, he talks about it. > what happens if the senders server is down or unreachable when I want to read the message? That is the second biggest problem with the system, after transition difficulties. Basically, someone (your ISP or you) needs to run a reliable mail server. That's a minor disadvantage perhaps, but keep in mind how it compares to 1200 spams a day. > this idea would work in a world where everyone has pleanty of bandwidth and storage and everything is always up, but in the real world it's little better then a dream to toy with. some good may come of it, but this is nowhere near being a deployable system. I really don't see how you can come to that conclusion. Of course it's deployable. It doesn't even use more bandwidth and storage in the long run. It will use much less bandwidth because of less spam. And storage would be less because it would only store one copy of an outgoing message to many users. Receiver-side storage would only be on his local computer, not on the server. (Ok, an IMAP-like mode could change that.)
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