[PLUG] Email spam...

[Michael C. Robinson]

Well I've discovered the hard way that blocking ips doesn't work very
well though I am wondering if I the following is a reasonable anti
smut approach:

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         
DROP       all  --  67.30.135.152        0.0.0.0/0          
DROP       all  --  63.66.136.100        0.0.0.0/0          
DROP       all  --  67.30.133.77         0.0.0.0/0          
DROP       all  --  64.214.130.56        0.0.0.0/0          

These sites are either directly sending it to me or in
some cases I think they are relays.

I've sent a complaint to abuse at level3.com, maybe they
can stop some of the the porn properly.  It's frustrating, 
anyone can sign you up for something where there seem to 
be no rules that a content provider has to honor to get 
you off their mailing lists.  Some of these sites say 
don't enter if your under age, but anyone can go into
a lot of them.  I wonder how an undercover police person 
would feel if he/she couldn't get off one of these sites
after investigating it?

I get some stuff that I'm fairly sure nobody ever 
subscribed to.  Viagra ads are pretty common.

Looking at email's form it seems if a header 
is at all faked that there's a high probability 
it's spam.  How do you find out if certain sites 
only send objectionable material as I would think 
you could just block them.  If you filter email
at your own site, that in affect encourages the 
sender to keep sending it to you.  Unfortunately,
the approach of blocking email servers comes with 
other problems.  I think part of the problem is 
that a lot of the porn mail sources appear to be 
individual private email addresses.  There are
darn near an infinite number of private email
addresses compared to the number of ISP's
and formal content providers.

How does sendmail or any other MTA decide to 
send to an intermediary mail transfer agent 
instead of attempting a direct connection to 
the destination?

Is it me or is AT&T really bad about relaying
pornographic materials?  If I didn't know any
better, I'd think it's a big business for some
of these phone companies to distribute this
stuff to whomever they can.  It's probably 
as bad for some people as it would
be to put a bar in an alcoholic's house 
where only the alcoholic frequents it 
and the bar never goes dry.
 
There's other problem areas for Internet 
delivered content as well, some video 
games have absorbed people so completely 
that they have committed suicide just to 
stop playing.

     --  Michael