RE: The open relay problem.

> From: [email protected]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 4:30 PM
>
>
> On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Seth Goodman wrote:
>

<...>

>
> Classical game theory would argue that if such a forwarder was performing
> SPF incorrectly, it would be treated exactly as if it were a source of
> spam in its own right. Indeed, the two are always indistinguishable. ...

I had an additional comment on this that I forgot to mention.  Though the
original spammer and the forwarder may be indistinguishable from a gaming
perspective, they are treated differently in terms of spam reporting and
blacklisting.  When you report a spam to blacklist, they attempt to locate
the spam source.  Though they send abuse reports to the spammer's ISP,
forwarders and in some cases upstream providers, the responsible lists try
to only list the IP of the machine that originated the spam.  Though some
blacklists intentionally "widened the net" by listing an entire provider, an
upstream or a forwarder and some made listings for arbitrary or malicious
reasons, those lists fared poorly due to high false positive rates.  This
used to be a serious problem, but it has largely corrected itself due to
people choosing the responsible lists.

If this is all a misconception on my part, hopefully the forwarders out
there will gently correct and educate me.

--

Seth Goodman