[112377] in North American Network Operators' Group

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RE: Yahoo and their mail filters..

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ray Corbin)
Wed Feb 25 11:16:38 2009

From: Ray Corbin <rcorbin@traffiq.com>
To: Richey <mylists@battleop.com>, "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:14:31 -0600
In-Reply-To: <05e701c99762$eb810460$c2830d20$@com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org

It depends on your environment. I've seen where it is helpful and where it =
is overwhelming. If you are a smaller company and want to know why you keep=
 getting blocked then those should help. If you are a larger company and ge=
t a several hundred a day, but you send 100k emails to AOL then it is not a=
s big of a deal. If you are a shared hosting provider and you get a lot of =
them you should look into what is being sent to AOL, such as forwarded spam=
 from customers 'auto forwards' (isolate the auto forwards to a separate IP=
 address and simply don't sign up for the FBL for it).... If you have a goo=
d setup where only customer-originated email is being sent through the IP's=
 you have a FBL on, then it is useful and you shouldn't get as many complai=
nts.

-r


-----Original Message-----
From: Richey [mailto:mylists@battleop.com]=20
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 11:06 AM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: RE: Yahoo and their mail filters..

> Feedback loops often aren't that useful either. We're on the AOL Scomp=20
> feedback loop, and we've often got fairly personal email sent to our=20
> abuse desk because the users simply press spam rather than delete.

AOL's Scomp is spam it's self.   If I read though 100 messages maybe one
message is really spam.   The other 99 are jokes, regular emails, maybe a
news letter from their church, etc.   Most people are lazy and would rather
click on the Spam button instead of unsubscribing for a list they subscribe=
d
to in the first place.

Richey

-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Corbin [mailto:rcorbin@traffiq.com]=20
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:27 AM
To: Suresh Ramasubramanian; Niall Donegan
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: RE: Yahoo and their mail filters..

Funny we were just having similar conversation on mailop.org :) . Suresh is
right about the feedback loops (you also should subscribe to
comcasts/hotmails/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 spam problems arise, such as the pesky Nigerian spammers who
constantly find new ways to thwart all anti-fraud checks prior to creating
the accounts. One thing that I did, when being an email admin for a very
large shared hosting 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 send to them. I talked to the customer and even gave
them alternative solutions (such as giving them 6months free for Postini
inbound anti-spam service for that forward account). The worst ones were
those who had catchalls setup to forward to their spam@yahoo.com account,
those simply got notified that 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





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