North American Network Operators Group

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Re: 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP

  • From: Joe Maimon
  • Date: Sun Sep 25 19:11:45 2005


[email protected] wrote:

Yes, this is quite clearly the case; there are dozens of mutual customers
who have forwarding rules setup.  We are not generating Spam to send to
Bellsouth; it's coming from somewhere else and then being forwarded.

I imagine that at some time in the future, forwarding e-mail might become
impractical, if receiving systems insist on parsing it as originated or
relayed Spam.

No, what will happen more and more is that parties who forward email will have to make a "best effort" to ensure that it is not spam.

Meaning a policy "unfiltered email does not get fowarded to external parties"

Its pretty simple. Its garbage and its coming from you. Block.

Happens to be it is not trivial (currently probably rarely possible) to guarantee that email is forwarded, rather than simply originated with forged headers.

Hopefully this will generate/increase a positive network effect for aggressive spam filtering, from blocklists, graylists, content filtering and so on.

Unfortunately the network effect is likely not to be a pleasant experience for many providers, as you have recently found out.

Customers may be entitled to request complete unfiltered access of their email account to the world, but they are not entitled in this day and age to expect that to carry over into a privelege for provider A to dump crap into provider B without a prior arrangement/understanding between provider A and B.


This the first I've heard of BS having a 50/5 threshold limit.
Bellsouth has given us no statistics, no logs, no headers, not even a
timeframe for their vague claims.  We can clearly see from our side that we
are not generating nor relaying Spam.  But our customers can no longer
choose to forward their e-mail to Bellsouth.  It seems that Bellsouth is
restricting its customers.

Kevin


This is a problem. Headers would go a long way to disabling the forwarding instances and/or mandating strict filtering for those customers.

That being said, assuming you have told bellsouth you were working on eliminating raw forwarding they should have worked immediately to lift the block and give you the benefit of the doubt.

In the absence of retained technical evidence, a "easy out" blocklist and an "easy in" whitelist should be the norm.

Joe