OT: Political Spam - what can you do about it?

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 01:46:36PM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>> "r" == redhat  <redhat at fayelectric.com> writes:
> 
> r> I have a customer on our system (we're local ISP) that fancies
> r> himself quite the political spinmeister.  He absolutely inundates
> r> people with his (what I call) SPAM email.
> 
> If you're an ISP, you write the acceptable use policy and so it's
> purely up to you and your lawyers to decide whether this fits within
> the scope or not.  If your AUP permits what this person is doing then
> you'd better change it, because if this user really is doing wide scale
> spamming then you probably deserve all of the blocklist entries you
> will receive.  It is simply not reasonable for an ISP to expect to be
> able to get away with a weak or spam-friendly AUP these days.

Blacklisting for an ISP is not a good thing but it can also be used to
advantage.  Designate one subnet as 10complaintsPlus or some such
'trouble' list.  Assign this user and other 'trouble' hosts to this
subnet.  Just to save bandwidth, you have some need to scan for virus
symptoms and other problems.  When you 'smell' a problem you might
disconnect then move that host to a quarantine net.

The value of this is that spam detectors can detect the source IP address
and increase the score on the other end of things.  In this way you do 
not need to terminate service.  You will have made one step toward 
cause for pulling that service.

The trigger for action would be complaints in addition other policy based
review (perhaps bandwidth).

The alternative is that all your nets would be blacklisted because 
of one user.


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	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
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