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No. That is not why, the reason must be something else. The only explanation that makes sense is deliberate sabotage to eradicate competition. But I'm not sugge

by tjoff 9y ago

No. That is not why, the reason must be something else. The only explanation that makes sense is deliberate sabotage to eradicate competition. But I'm not suggesting that, it is just that I can not think of any other reason. What is the motivation for the "guilty by association"? Because you can not verify who sent it. With SPF and DKIM you can - that is the whole point, you know beyond any doubt that the machine supposed to send that mail actually did send it. Now, if the person behind that machine is a spammer (or has been hijacked by a spammer) and sends out a lot of spam (and gets reported as such) then just nuke that sender. It is dead easy to do regardless of what IP it was sent from - each mail have identification credentials built in. It could not get any easier to do. The sender did all of the work for you by going through the extra effort of identifying itself.

DanBC 9y ago
> What is the motivation for the "guilty by association"? One that has been given in the past is "Stop paying money to companies that host spammer websites and spammer email servers, or we'll block your email too" (I don't particularly agree with it, but it was common to see that argument on news.admin.net-abuse.email
jazoom 9y ago
Exactly. I also find this ridiculous.
bradknowles 9y ago
Yeah, but they don’t identify themselves correctly. They lie. Sometimes they claim to be real people with real e-mail addresses that they don’t actually own, and maybe that real person is you — in which case it is your reputation that gets permanently dinged. Sometimes they claim to be fake people with fake e-mail addresses that don’t actually exist, in which case all you really know is the IP address they used to send the message. When they do this, they frequently arrange to get a large block of IP addresses they can use, and then cycle through them very quickly — maybe no more than five minutes per IP address. Anyone else who happens to be in that same range now gets their reputation dinged by association. There’s a lot of tricks spammers use to try to hide their activity. And lots of ways to try to detect and reject that on the other end. It’s a never-ending arms race, and on the Internet it is easy to hide and hard to take out miscreants without causing excessive collateral damage. And many big providers don’t care if they cause collateral damage.
- tjoff 9y ago
  You obviously don't know what SPF and DKIM are. Which is at the core of my whole point. Now, if SPF and DKIM has not been configured then fine. That is something else, resort to whatever technique you have to.
detaro 9y ago
Spammers have SPF and DKIM set up for their domains, too. Why does it seem so impossible to you that if mail hosters see "this IP block hosted a lot of domains that turned out be spammy" they react with "block it" or at least "block it if new sites pop up there"? (and as a private user, you're often enough "new" because you don't send all that much mail) Yes, it'd be nice if they didn't do that, but small sites are and will be acceptable collateral damage to them.
KyeRussell 9y ago
SPF / DKIM let you know that who you think you're receiving mail from and who you're actually receiving mail from are the same person. How that that come into this at all? Spammers can say they're from onlinechemist@spam.com via SPF / DKIM and it's still going to come through. I don't know who you're even trying to convince. You're talking in hypotheticals and being extremely idealistic. How the email ecosystem works and how it actually works are two very different things. You cannot say "the reason must be something else!" as if - just because you can't make sense of the situation - it is not so.
- tjoff 9y ago
  Then you reduce the credibility of spam.com and possibly any links to whoever setup that domain etc. Not whatever IP was used. I'm not being idealistic when I say that I should be able to send an email over internet and have it delivered without someone banning me for reasons beyond my control.
  - colejohnson66 9y ago
    What should happen and what actually happens are two different things
    - tjoff 9y ago
      Very much so, but in this case it is because of moronic humans doing deliberate harm for no good reason. That could be said about lots of things, but this is kind of remarkable in how much effort is being made to make something as bad as possible.

by tjoff 9y ago

DanBC 9y ago

> What is the motivation for the "guilty by association"? One that has been given in the past is "Stop paying money to companies that host spammer websites and spammer email servers, or we'll block your email too" (I don't particularly agree with it, but it was common to see that argument on news.admin.net-abuse.email

jazoom 9y ago

Exactly. I also find this ridiculous.

bradknowles 9y ago

Yeah, but they don’t identify themselves correctly. They lie. Sometimes they claim to be real people with real e-mail addresses that they don’t actually own, and maybe that real person is you — in which case it is your reputation that gets permanently dinged. Sometimes they claim to be fake people with fake e-mail addresses that don’t actually exist, in which case all you really know is the IP address they used to send the message. When they do this, they frequently arrange to get a large block of IP addresses they can use, and then cycle through them very quickly — maybe no more than five minutes per IP address. Anyone else who happens to be in that same range now gets their reputation dinged by association. There’s a lot of tricks spammers use to try to hide their activity. And lots of ways to try to detect and reject that on the other end. It’s a never-ending arms race, and on the Internet it is easy to hide and hard to take out miscreants without causing excessive collateral damage. And many big providers don’t care if they cause collateral damage.

tjoff 9y ago
You obviously don't know what SPF and DKIM are. Which is at the core of my whole point. Now, if SPF and DKIM has not been configured then fine. That is something else, resort to whatever technique you have to.

detaro 9y ago

Spammers have SPF and DKIM set up for their domains, too. Why does it seem so impossible to you that if mail hosters see "this IP block hosted a lot of domains that turned out be spammy" they react with "block it" or at least "block it if new sites pop up there"? (and as a private user, you're often enough "new" because you don't send all that much mail) Yes, it'd be nice if they didn't do that, but small sites are and will be acceptable collateral damage to them.

KyeRussell 9y ago

SPF / DKIM let you know that who you think you're receiving mail from and who you're actually receiving mail from are the same person. How that that come into this at all? Spammers can say they're from onlinechemist@spam.com via SPF / DKIM and it's still going to come through. I don't know who you're even trying to convince. You're talking in hypotheticals and being extremely idealistic. How the email ecosystem works and how it actually works are two very different things. You cannot say "the reason must be something else!" as if - just because you can't make sense of the situation - it is not so.

tjoff 9y ago
Then you reduce the credibility of spam.com and possibly any links to whoever setup that domain etc. Not whatever IP was used. I'm not being idealistic when I say that I should be able to send an email over internet and have it delivered without someone banning me for reasons beyond my control.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  What should happen and what actually happens are two different things
  - tjoff 9y ago
    Very much so, but in this case it is because of moronic humans doing deliberate harm for no good reason. That could be said about lots of things, but this is kind of remarkable in how much effort is being made to make something as bad as possible.