On Tue, Feb 10, 1998 at 01:37:23PM +0100, John Martin wrote:
At 12:03 pm +0100 10/2/98, Piet Beertema wrote:
I thought that those of you who attended the spam BoF last week might be interested to note the IMC survey of publicly-known relaying smtp servers.
The problem with this survey is that it is by no means exhaustive (500 mail hosts is in fact peanuts compared to the number of mail hosts globally), and probably for that reason doesn't mention the names of the hosts that allow relaying.
[If you remember, "naming-and-shaming" was thought to be unconstructive when discussed at the recent RIPE anti-SPAM BoF meeting. Is this what you mean? Personally, I think that this is a bit too agressive.]
What IMHO is completely overseen in this context is that there are not only a lot of open MX relays, but also *much* more open workstations, even in domains that have relay-closed MX mailers. And although this workstations may be "protected" by valid MX records, they still have open mailers which can be misused. (Take at random ONE big university, collect all A records within that domain and its subdomains, and test for relaying. I would predict an extremely high success rate.) While most system admins may get their MX mailers closed they will have problems doing this with the hundreds/thousands of workstations. And even if they do, those systems - from my experience - are often maintained by unqualified users and the next update they do will destroy the sysadmins former efforts. This will become a much more relevant topic in spam fighting than the open MX mailers are now. At least IMHO :-) \Maex -- SpaceNet GmbH | http://www.Space.Net/ | In a world whithout Research & Development | mailto:research@Space.Net | walls and fences, Frankfurter Ring 193a | Tel: +49 (89) 32356-0 | who needs D-80807 Muenchen | Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 | Windows and Gates?