You’d think that huge email services would have a vested interest reducing spam. Not only does spam occupy disk space (which gets cheaper all the time, admittedly), but it also protects their clientele from all types of fraud and deception. Indeed many of them don’t.
Traditionally, email servers had accounts that were specifically made to be a repository of complaints. These accounts have titles, as mentioned before, of admin@ or postmaster@ or majordomo@ the service provider’s domain. Some large services don’t have them at all. Some have them but these accounts are unwatched. Others misconfigure the account. Here’s one from just an hour ago:
The original message was received at Wed, 8 Oct 2008 16:07:41 +0200
from qmta08.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net [76.96.30.80]
—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
—– Transcript of session follows —–
MAILBOX FULL!!!
550 5.0.0
Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.j-mail.info
Received-From-MTA: DNS; qmta08.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net
Arrival-Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 16:07:41 +0200
Final-Recipient: RFC822; abuse%strompost.com
X-Actual-Recipient: rfc822; abuse%strompost.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.3.0
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 16:07:42 +0200
From: Tom Henderson
To: abuse%strompost.com
Subject: phish fraud Fwd: Proposal Request!
This, of course, lacks diligence of any kind. Oddly, if one looks up the owner of the domain, it appears to be the Austrian Internic, or if I’m not mistaken, Internet.AT.
How do deal with unresponsive email service providers? There are a number of useful suggestions that I’ve heard, but the sanest seem to surround simply routing around their IPV4/6 addresses. This effectively cuts them off and forces them to deal with their onerous situation. More on that, tomorrow.
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