[112366] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Yahoo and their mail filters..
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ray Corbin)
Wed Feb 25 09:26:56 2009
From: Ray Corbin <rcorbin@traffiq.com>
To: Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com>, Niall Donegan
<niall@blacknight.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:26:33 -0600
In-Reply-To: <bb0e440a0902250341j26502f69qd39f97362af40bb9@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Funny we were just having similar conversation on mailop.org :) . Suresh is=
right about the feedback loops (you also should subscribe to comcasts/hotm=
ails/trend micro's (mail-abuse.com)). If you don't have an external gateway=
that makes doing reports easy then they are a good way to find out when sp=
am problems arise, such as the pesky Nigerian spammers who constantly find =
new ways to thwart all anti-fraud checks prior to creating the accounts. On=
e thing that I did, when being an email admin for a very large shared hosti=
ng company, was when I ran reports of emails going to @yahoo.com I took the=
top 10 or so recipients and figured out who had the forwarders setup to se=
nd to them. I talked to the customer and even gave them alternative solutio=
ns (such as giving them 6months free for Postini inbound anti-spam service =
for that forward account). The worst ones were those who had catchalls setu=
p to forward to their spam@yahoo.com account, those simply got notified tha=
t it was removed.=20
-r
-----Original Message-----
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian [mailto:ops.lists@gmail.com]=20
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 6:42 AM
To: Niall Donegan
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Yahoo and their mail filters..
On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Niall Donegan <niall@blacknight.com> wrote=
:
>
> Another interesting side effect of that is email forwarder accounts.
> Take a user who gets a domain on our shared hosting setup and forwards
> the email for certain users to a Yahoo account. If those mails are
> marked as spam, it seems to be our server that gets blacklisted rather
> than the originating server.
>
No surprise. Guess whose IP is the one handing off to yahoo?
If you have forwarding users -
* Spam filter them to reject spam rather than simply tag and forward it.
* Isolate your forwarding traffic through a single IP, Let ISPs know.
> Feedback loops often aren't that useful either. We're on the AOL Scomp
> feedback loop, and we've often got fairly personal email sent to our
> abuse desk because the users simply press spam rather than delete.
You have a far smaller userbase, and a userbase you know. For us, with
random nigerians and other spammers signing up / trying to sign up all
the time, FBLs are invaluable as a realtime notification of spam
issues.
And as I said random misdirected spam reports wont trigger a block as
much as your leaking forwarded spam. Or your getting a hacked cgi/php
or a spammer installed direct to mx spamware. [so if you are cpanel -
smtp tweak/csf firewall and mod_security for apache should be default
on your install if you havent already done so]
-srs