[11568] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: An end to spam through Graphnet

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg A. Woods)
Fri Aug 1 20:19:49 1997

Date: Fri, 1 Aug 1997 20:15:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods)
To: Geoff White <geoffw@precipice.v-site.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Geoff White's message
	of "Fri, August 1, 1997 14:32:34 -0700"
	regarding "Re: An end to spam through Graphnet"
	id <Pine.SUN.3.95.970801142840.27468g-100000@precipice.v-site.net>
Reply-To: woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods)

[ On Fri, August 1, 1997 at 14:32:34 (-0700), Geoff White wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: An end to spam through Graphnet
>
> Can anyone elaborate a little more on the "one true" set of procedures
> that one should take to prevent spammers from abusing ones resources.

If you're using smail-3 then the latest beta makes prevention of illegal
third party abuse quite trivial in the simplest cases (and the beta to
come defaults to preventing abuse for normal configs).

> The current problem that I have is valid customers who are "on the road"
> and want to sendmail through my SMTP server when they dial into 
> att or netcom, before their eudora's used to point their SMTP server
> at me, that ain't happenin' after my spam attach so is there some work
> around that they can use?

Oi!  I'd say "Just say NO!".  This is one of the things I was thinking
about for iPass (and in some ways it's already implemented in some of
their custom installs by way of custom authentication their clients
already had in place), but for random joe dial-up providor you're SOL.

Maybe you could provide some form of authenticating SMTP proxy, but I'd
hate to imagine what might have to be done to client software to enable
such a capability.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>

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