[PLUG] How dangerous is handling my own mail?

[Ian Burrell]

Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> 
> Where's the evidence of this?  You can point to particular open relays
> that were overrun with spam, but that's only because the rest of the
> relays have been closed.  Oftentimes they are FORCED closed by the
> extortion and coersion tactics of self-appointed "cops".
> 

Back when I reported spam, I saw lots of them that came through open 
relays.  That may have changed with spammers doing more direct sending 
and using zombies to send it out.  Nearly all relays are open because 
they were misconfigured.

> I can point you to a couple of people that leave their relays open so that
> they can send mail from anywhere with any client or even hand-inject it if
> need be.
> 

Are they public where they can be scanned?  An open relay on a 
non-standard port should be pretty safe from being found.  Same for one 
that gets started when needed.  I don't see much point to a public relay 
when a private one works just well.

> 
> This idea of making the network less generally useful to fight some
> particular use is ass-backward.
> 

Except that spam makes the network less generally useful by breaking how 
mail should work.  For example, I had to take down our secondary MX at 
work because it was feeding in spam and generating lots of worthless 
bounce messages.

  - Ian

-- 
ian at znark.com
http://www.znark.com/