[vox] spam question

[Tony Cratz]

Cylar Z wrote:
> 
> I get an average of 3-4 failed spam attempts each day.
> The overwhelming majority come from China or Korea,
> though I do sometimes see other types of failed
> attacks (mod_proxy, etc) from Europe and other parts
> of the world.

	I run Sendmail instead of postfix (at least for now) because
	I have been using Sendmail for over twenty years.

	What I do is use a couple of black lists to help reduce the
	amount of SPAM I receive they are: Spamhaus, Spamcop,
	cn.countries.nerd.dk which blocks China IPs, japan.blackholes.us
	for Japan, russia.blackholes.us for Russia,
	argentina.blackholes.us For Argentina, hongkong.blackholes.us
	for Hong Kong, mexico.blackholes.us for Mexico,
	singapore.blackholes.us for Singapore and korea.blackholes.us
	for Korea.

	Some of those have very few hits some have a large number of
	hits (Spamhaus, Spamcop and China).

> Sometimes I do a WHOIS on the originating IP address,
> and among other information it returns an email
> address along the lines of "report spam to
> abuse@<hostname>.com."

	I found it to be a waste of time. Which is why I use Spamhaus
	and Spamcop.

> Or do you believe that the ISP's admin is himself
> responsible in many of these cases and that
> complaining would therefore be futile?

	The ISP's can only block the spam which is sent via them. Most
	spammers do not use an ISP mail server to forward through. They
	use their own SMTP server.

	But if you have paid attention to what is going on with the
	bot networks you know they are now the ones sending out the
	SPAMs. And all of those bot servers are due to a couple of
	things. 1) Home users running Microsoft. 2) ISP not blocking
	spam and viruses as they come into their systems for their
	users. 3) Mail clients (Outlook) which will allow .exe and
	Office macro to be executed without scanning for a virus.
	4) IE which does not scan web pages for links to .exe files
	and warn the user they may be screwing up their system by
	downloading this program.

	All of these together has cause our problems with SPAM.
	I run a virus scanner on all E-mail coming into my system not
	so much for my self but because I do have some mail lists
	and I don't want someone coming back to me and saying they
	got a virus from my mail list server.


							Tony