North American Network Operators Group

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Re: amazonaws.com?

  • From: Christopher Morrow
  • Date: Sat May 24 14:08:44 2008

On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Kee Hinckley <[email protected]> wrote:
> On May 24, 2008, at 3:24 AM, Colin Alston wrote:
>>
>> You should not accept SMTP from the Amazon EC2 cloud at all. Amazon don't
>> intend for anyone to use it as an email platform and tell their clients to
>> use an external relay.
>
> I'm sure this is good advice. But if an ISP used that as an excuse for not
> taking action, we'd hang them over hot coals. Is Amazon truly not policing
> the network for spammers?

not to excuse this, but... it's not a simple problem. The 'bad guy'
rolls up to the website, orders 200 machines for 20 mins under the
name 'xplosiveman' pays with some paypal/CC and runs his/her job. That
job happens to create a bunch of email outbound. It could be a
legitimate email service outsourcing their compute/bw needs to AWS, it
could be 'pick-yer-bad-spammer' ... AWS really can't tell until after
when the complaints roll in. :(

I suppose they could say: "no tcp/25 outbound from AWS computer
clusters", though that's probably a decent market in the real
email-deliver-services :( Also, truly bad folk will just move to using
proxies or other methods :(

-Chris.