Breaking news:
Breaking news: Internet Spam Providers There seems to be
something extra-hideous going on all over the Internet. Over the last
couple of days, huge IP blocks from major ISPs have been added
to “blackhole lists” (online databases of IP addresses known to freely
propagate spam e-mail (known as ‘relaying’)). Customers of Verio.net,
Pacbell.net, UUnet, and others have started to see massive e-mail outages as
their home computers, connected via DSL, have been ensnared in these huge nets
of “spam relay IP ranges”. Furthermore, these ISPs are also starting to see
their primary mail servers (shared by non-DSL customers) show up on these
lists as well.
Example: pacbell’s
record at spambag.org. Listed as spamrelays are pacbell’s mail
servers as well as huge swaths of their DSL customer IP space.
Oh, so, the reason this is a problem: spam-conscious mail servers
can subscribe to these blackhole-lists, and will commonly refuse to
accept e-mail from hosts identified by the lists. Irony: As part
of this recent blackhole epidemic, many of these “spam-conscious mail
servers” are themselves on the blackhole lists!
The result is that many pacbell (for example) customers are now unable to send
or receive e-mail because other mail hosts won’t have anything to do with
those customers’ IP addresses (or with pacbell’s mail servers); these poor
souls are then turned away handily by first-level Pacific Bell tech support
with a curt “sorry, something must be messed up on your end.” A friend of mine has been able to get up to
Tier II tech support by explaining to billing that the massive load of
support calls they’ve had recently aren’t about to go away any time soon, and
that this is a bigger problem than a lot of misconfigured e-mail clients.
More news as I find it.