When I tried to mail to a few AOL e-mail addresses I got the following:
554- AOL does not accept e-mail transactions from IP addresses which
554- generate complaints or transmit unsolicited bulk e-mail.
554 Connecting IP: 216.86.77.194
How do we go about lifting this blockade?
Ahmet Toprak
http://www.KKUP.org/toprak.html
11 responses total.
See the item in agora about why spamcop has put grex on their RBL blacklist, because of spammers sending spam from here. Other ISPs besides AOL also use the RBL list. The staff is looking for ideas on how to stop outgoing spam.
This is ridiculous! An outfit by the name of SORBS is listing us as sending spam, and they want a "fine" of $50 to delist! Read below what I got when I looked into what it takes to delisting us: Ahmet Toprak -------------------------------------------------------------------- Delisting 216.86.77.194 From the Spam Received Database Removal from the SORBS Spammers database is not automatic, nor is it free, you are required to pay a 'fine'. SORBS does not like requiring a fine, however it has proved nessesary in driving the message home, that you the users are responsible for what you and your machines do on the Internet. This particually applies when your machine is infected with a virus or trojan, getting infected with a virus or trojan can enable your computer to be used in an illegal attack on other computers and networks. Many of you will complain indicating you didn't know, however if you pass a Police speed camera at more than the speed limit, try explaining to them that "you didn't know what the limit was", you will get the same response from SORBS. Think it's outrageous? Well we the administrators of the internet find it outrageous that 15 year old children can hold Banking institutions and major companies to ransom by using 1000's of infected machines from around the world to flood networks, just because they feel like it. We also think it is outrageous that known people are able to use infected machines to defeat controls put in place specifically to stop spam, to fill our email boxes with so much rubbish that our servers become useless for what we need them for. Even more outrageous is that they can drive around in luxury cars, maybe own a yatch, and live in exclusive multi-million dollar houses by stealing the use of these machines. Putting an unpatched, unfirewalled Microsoft Windows machine on the Internet is irresponsible in the highest degree, installing a proxy server and leaving it open for the world to use is both foolish and irresponsible, yet people are doing these things every day, and no one is telling them they can't or that it is wrong. The 'fine' is US $50.00 and is designed to be small enough to so that the home user will think twice about getting listed a second time, and small enough to be a 'right royal pain in the butt' to any large company. The idea being, that whether you are a multi-national company or a single home user, you will think twice about getting relisted for any reason.
It's blackmail. Even if we paid off this blackmail, and implemented a perfect filter against the spammers, all it would take is one moderately motivated and pathologically minded jerk to get us relisted by sending a mail or two to any one of their spamtrap addresses.
It is indeed blackmail, one that I hope we will never pay.
The ironic thing about AOL blocking our mail is that the spammers/phishers who have sent out these recent batches of problem mail are logging into Grex from AOL IP addresses. I hadn't heard of the SORBS policy, but I guess when I get back to Ketchikan I'll reconfigure the mail server at our ISP to not pay attention to SORBS any more.
Can we report AOL to spamcop?
Grex IS a spammer ISP. Like it or not, spammers are allowed to send mass amounts of mail in a small timeframe from here. The $50 may seem excessive, but it surely means one of two things: You fix the prob or you dont
Actually, the AOL blocking mentioned in #0 is unrelated to RBL lists. Basically, every time an AOL user gets an email, if they think it is spam, they click on a "This is spam" button. This reports the email to AOL's automated system, and the IP address from which it came is reported in AOL's database. It's a rolling system... if the "complaints" stop, then after a short while, AOL stops blocking you based on those complaints. Thankfully, AOL offers something called a "Feedback Loop" which notifies you, as the responsible party for a particular IP address every time a complaint is generated - and I believe it sends you a copy of the mail or the mail headers. This allows postmaters to help determine which users are actually causing the spam. I had to do this at one point on my server because - as it turned out - one of my customers had a compromised version of phpBB You can find out more info about the feedback loop here: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/fbl/fblinfo.html
I sent another email to AOL today about this problem, with listings of when the spam weasels were on, etc. I found better (well, hopefully better) addresses to send this to. We'll see if it does any good.
.. but if aol is rejecting email from grex ... ahhh, another account. shmart!
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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