Subject: Re: AD's

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 08:55:54 -0700 (MST)

> Ironically, turning off relaying in new servers forces spammers to use
> older ones, which - in some cases - makes tracing more difficult or
> impossible.

As demonstrated that comment and other recent comments about spam, the
main IETF list is not the place to talk about fighting spam.

Spammers have from soon after relaying started, been forced to use older
systems.  From my personal observations, the spammers are now going farther
afield than ever before.  However, spammers are now much less, not more
likely to find a relay that does not record the previous hop's IP address
than they were a year ago.  At one time, it seemed to me about 50% of spam
came through relays that did not capture the previous hop's IP address.
Today, those are (at least in my now small sample) exceptional cases.

In the many other places where many MBytes have been written on spam, such
facts as the costs of spam to relays, the distribution of relays, the
reasons for and frequency of vendor-supplied configurations with relaying
on, and so forth are well known, although there are also plenty of comments
from people who don't extrapolate well from little data.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]