North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Attn MCI/UUNet - Massive abuse from your network

  • From: Ben Browning
  • Date: Wed Jun 23 16:44:19 2004

At 10:45 PM 6/22/2004, Tim Thorne wrote:
Not so long ago I took a long look at the SBL for MCI and I came to
the conclusion that the data is mostly out of date and therefore
inaccurate. The folks at the SBL posting in NANAE said this may be the
case, but its up to the MCI folks to clean up the SBL database.
MCI does not want to "legitimize" blacklists by helping clean up their own records.

Any company or network that afraid of accountability obviously must have its reasons. I am sure they have seen the many many times some provider has said "We removed Spammer A" and the antispam community has responded with "Great, how about spammers B through Z?". That's a question they don't and won't answer beyond the token "Email to [email protected] does get read". Maybe it does- I am not MCI, so I don't know. Regardless of whether the mail does get read, the spammers remain connected. Why? One can only come to the conclusion that it is either due to technical ineptitude or protection of their revenue stream. Likewise, they have no doubt noticed that providers that lie about canning spammers are quickly outed, and their blocklist listings(and no doubt private firewall rules, which are much harder to escape) tend to expand greatly. So, MCI has (correctly) identified that their options as A) clean up their network B) try to lie or C) do nothing. Given that A involves loss of revenue and a (short term) increase in labor and B will cause them even more problems, C is their obvious recourse.

>As an example, I see a posting that says emailtools.com was alive on
>206.67.63.41 in 2000. They aren't there any more... But now:

Emailtools.com aren't spammers, but they sell spamware. That subtle
difference is enough to keep them on the MCI network.
This may be true, but Atriks is still there, and they are one of the most technically malicious spammers in the game today. Spam support is spam support, whether you are hosting the website, DNS, proxy mining operation, or a drop-box. Any provider that is OK with hosting software that does this:

"Email Marketing 98 is our high-end email marketing tool. It is one of the best extractors on the market while remaining price competitive. At the push of a button, Email Marketing 98 will retrieve Email addresses of all the posters on an Internet news group or a series of groups. Then it will send your Email message to any or all of those addresses."

may as well be sending the spam themselves, IMO.

If you want rid
of sites like this that are based in Florida, then you best get
Florida to change their laws.
Wouldn't *that* be lovely.

---
   Ben Browning <[email protected]>
      The River Internet Access Co.
         WA Operations Manager
1-877-88-RIVER  http://www.theriver.com