Re: [exim] DNSBLs

John W. Baxter wrote:
> > (you
> > might even persuade tiscali to stop hosting 419 scams - but perhaps
> > that's just wishful thinking)

As one of the admins of the mail services at UK Tiscali, I've pushed
for a lot more active stance by the company on spam (especially as
large percentage of the mail from our webmail service is 419 spam/euro
lotto fraud). I personally loathe the fact we send so much crud
to the internet as a whole.

The directors (who decide on the technical policy of the company),
refuse to do much about it (even tho we've suggested a page full
of things we can do to try and combat it). We've had very little
co-operation in that regard. They deal is symptoms rather than
causes.

We've asked for the webmail service to be Tiscali customers only,
but that was rejected that out of hand. The fact we've higlighted
to the people who make the decision about the spam, seems irrelivent.

We've only recently gained an 'abuse' team, who consist of callcenter
staff, so it's not exactly a technically versed department; So again
their is not going to too much proactive work being done on this (I think
the main reason we got this team was due to the unsuprising high number of
complaints we were getting about spam mail).

I've pushed, and negotiated, and shouted and mailed and pleaded with
my management, but very little has been done - they've blocked some
(Nigerian) IP space from access to webmail, thats been about it. I've
been given permission to disable accounts who send over a threshold of
mail in a set time, but yet again this is token efforts, reactivly
dealing with the problem, with very little effect on the true cause
of the spam.

All I can recommend is to have a very low trust level of mail sent via:

mk-smarthost-1.mail.uk.tiscali.com and
mk-smarthost-2.mail.uk.tiscali.com

as we've pointed the webmail servers to use these two smarthosts solely.

> Hmmm...we put our "local" block on much of the Tiscali empire, and carve out
> exceptions when someone goes to the URL we put in the (short) rejection text
> and completes the form (or when we trace a support call back to the block).
> We have about 6 Tiscali exceptions, gathered over the 9 months we've been
> doing this.

I'm sorry you've had to spend time setting all of this up, if I got my way
the spam would of ended well over a year and a half ago when I first hilighted
the problem, and have continued to try and get resolved since.

It strikes me as extraordinarily silly that Tiscali takes the stance
it does, but they are very much (like most modern companies) obsessed
with profit and figures and not much else.

Regards

Drav.

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Note: this is solely my opinion and not that of Tiscali UK, or Tiscali
International, Italy.