At 10:42 8/01/02 +1300, Dean Pemberton wrote:
Spam is bad MMM-kay Open relays are bad MMM-kay
Now the thing that I've been noticing lately is the increase of spam that comes right to my door directly from the company from which it was sent.
You're right of course, that some spammers are now sending mail straight to the destination mailserver particularly from dialup accounts and broadband connections with dynamic ip's, and it can be hard to detect or stop them because of it. But I still found in my sample of spam that well over 80% were via open relays, and open relays will always be popular for spammers because they can use them as a mail exploder. EG, they send one copy of a spam message over a dialup connection or other slow connection with hundreds of destination addresses and the open relay does the work expanding it, and delivering it to all the recipients with its high bandwidth connection... My worry is that while ordinary spam is damn annoying, this "new breed" of explicit spam is seriously tarnishing the image of the internet among the Joe average users who receive them. Yes, porn etc has always been easy to find on the internet, but you usually had to go looking for it. Now the porn comes looking for you :-( Regards, Simon Byrnand iGRIN Internet PS, nearly all the open relays I found turned out to be running Exchange Server....*cough* :) - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog