📄 rfc2635.txt
字号:
RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999 the probability of them being activated for non-spam is low enough. That way, although you may still have to pay to download it, you won't have to read it! Third, you may consider sending the mail back to the originator objecting to your being on the mailing-list; however, we recommend against this. First, a lot of spammers disguise who they are and where their mail comes from by forging the mail headers. Unless you are very experienced at reading headers discovering the true origin of the mail will probably prove difficult. Although you can engage your local support staff to help you with this, they may have much higher priorities (such as setting up site-wide filters to prevent spam from entering the site). Second, responding to this email will simply verify your address as valid and make your address more valuable for other (ab)uses (as was mentioned above in Section 3). Third, even if the two previous things do not happen, very probably your mail will be directed to the computer equivalent of a black hole (the bit-bucket). As of the writing of this document, there are several pieces of pending legislation in several jurisdictions about the sending of unsolicited mail and also about forging headers. If forging of headers should become illegal, then responding to the sender is less risky and may be useful. Certainly we advocate communicating to the originator (as best as you can tell) to let them know you will NOT be buying any products from them as you object to the method they have chosen to conduct their business (aka spam). Most responses through media other than electronic mail (mostly by those who take the time to phone included "800" (free to calling party in the U.S.) phone numbers) have proved somewhat effective. You can also call the business the advertisement is for, ask to speak to someone in authority, and then tell them you will never buy their products or use their services because their advertising mechanism is spam. Next, you can carbon copy or forward the questionable mail messages or news postings to your postmaster. You can do this by sending mail "To: Postmaster@your-site.example." Your postmaster should be an expert at reading mail headers and will be able to tell if the originating address is forged. He or she may be able to pinpoint the real culprit and help close down the site. If your postmaster wants to know about unsolicited mail, be sure s/he gets a copy, including headers. You will need to find out the local policy and comply.Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 7]RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999 *** IMPORTANT *** Wherever you send a complaint, be sure to include the full headers (most mail and news programs don't display the full headers by default). For mail it is especially important to show the "Received:" headers. For Usenet news, it is the "Path:" header. These normally show the route by which the mail or news was delivered. Without them, it's impossible to even begin to tell where the message originated. See the appendix for an example of a mail header. There is lively and ongoing debate about the validity of changing one's email address in a Web Browser in order to have Netnews posts and email look as if it is originating from some spot other than where it does originate. The reasoning behind this is that web email address harvesters will not be getting a real address when it encounters these. There is reason on both sides of this debate: If you change your address, you will not be as visible to the harvesters, but if you change your address, real people who need to contact you will be cut off as well. Also, if you are using the Internet through an organization such as a company, the company may have policies about "forging" addresses - even your own! Most people agree that the consequences of changing your email address on your browser or even in your mail headers is fairly dangerous and will nearly guarantee your mail goes into a black hole unless you are very sure you know what you are doing. Finally, DO NOT respond by sending back large volumes of unsolicited mail. Two wrongs do not make a right; do not become your enemy; and take it easy on the network. While the legal status of spam is uncertain, the legal status (at least in the U.S.) of a "mail bomb" (large numbers and/or sizes of messages to the site with the intent of disabling or injuring the site) is pretty clear: it is criminal. There is a web site called "www.abuse.net" which allows you to register, then send your message to the name of the "offending- domain@abuse.net," which will re-mail your message to the best reporting address for the offending domain. The site contains good tips for reporting abuse netnews or email messages. It also has some automated tools that you may download to help you filter your messages. Also check CIAC bulletin I-005 at: http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/i-005c.shtml or at: http://spam.abuse.net/spam/tools/mailblock.html.Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 8]RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999 Check the Appendix for a detailed explanation of tools and methodology to use when trying to chase down a spammer.4b. There's a Spam in My Group! Netnews is also subject to spamming. Here several factors help to mitigate against the propagation of spam in news, although they don't entirely solve the problem. Newsgroups and mailing lists may be moderated, which means that a moderator approves all mail/posts. If this is the case, the moderator usually acts as a filter to remove unwanted and off-topic posts/mail. In Netnews there are programs which detect posts which have been sent to multiple groups or which detect multiple posts from the same source to one group. These programs cancel the posts. While these work and keep unsolicited posts down, they are not 100% effective and spam in newsgroups seems to be growing at an even faster rate than spam in mail or on mailing lists. After all, it's much easier to post to a newsgroup for which there are thousands of readers than it is to find individual email addresses for all those folks. Hence the development of the "cancelbots" (sometimes called "cancelmoose") for Netnews groups. Cancelbots are triggered when one message is sent to a large number of newsgroups or when many small messages are sent (from one sender) to the same newsgroup. In general these are tuned to the "Breidbart Index" [3] which is a somewhat fuzzy measure of the interactions of the number of posts and number of groups. This is fuzzy purposefully, so that people will not post a number of messages just under the index and still "get away with it." And as noted above, the cancel messages have reached such a volume now that a lot of News administrators are beginning to write filters rather than send cancels. Still spam gets through, so what can a concerned netizen do? If there is a group moderator, make sure s/he knows that off-topic posts are slipping into the group. If there is no moderator, you could take the same steps for dealing with news as are recommended for mail with all the same caveats. A reasonable printed reference one might obtain has been published by O'Reilly and Associates, _Stopping Spam_, by Alan Schwartz and Simson Garfinkel [4]. This book also has interesting histories of spammers such as Cantor and Siegel, and Jeff Slaton. It gives fairly clear instructions for filtering mail and news.Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 9]RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 19995. Help for Beleaguered Admins As a system administrator, news administrator, local Postmaster, or mailing-list administrator, your users will come to you for help in dealing with unwanted mail and posts. First, find out what your institution's policy is regarding unwanted/unsolicited mail. It is possible that it won't do anything for you, but it is also possible to use it to justify blocking a domain which is sending particularly offensive mail to your users. If you don't have a clear policy, it would be really useful to create one. If you are a mailing-list administrator, make sure your mailing-list charter forbids off-topic posts. If your internal-only newsgroups are getting spammed from the outside of your institution, you probably have bigger security problems than just spam. Make sure that your mail and news transports are configured to reject messages injected by parties outside your domain. Recently misconfigured Netnews servers have become subject to hijacking by spammers. SMTP source routing <@relay.host:user@dest.host> is becoming deprecated due to its overwhelming abuse by spammers. You should configure your mail transport to reject relayed messages (when neither the sender nor the recipient are within your domain). Check: http://www.sendmail.org/ under the "Anti-Spam" heading. If you run a firewall at your site, it can be configured in ways to discourage spam. For example, if your firewall is a gateway host that itself contains an NNTP server, ensure that it is configured so it does not allow access from external sites except your news feeds. If your firewall acts as a proxy for an external news-server, ensure that it does not accept NNTP connections other than from your internal network. Both these potential holes have recently been exploited by spammers. Ensure that email messages generated within your domain have proper identity information in the headers, and that users cannot forge headers. Be sure your headers have all the correct information as stipulated by RFC 822 [5] and RFC 1123 [6]. If you are running a mailing-list, allowing postings only by subscribers means a spammer would actually have to join your list before sending spam messages, which is unlikely. Make sure your charter forbids any off-topic posts. There is another spam-related problem with mailing-lists which is that spammers like to retaliate on those who work against them by mass-subscribing their enemies to mailing-lists. Your mailing-list software should require confirmation of the subscription, and only then should the address be subscribed.Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 10]RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999 It is possible, if you are running a mail transfer agent that allows it, to block persistant offending sites from ever getting mail into your site. However, careful consideration should be taken before taking that step. For example, be careful not to block out sites for which you run MX records! In the long run, it may be most useful to help your users learn enough about their mailers so that they can write rules to filter their own mail, or provide rules and kill files for them to use, if they so choose. There is information about how to configure sendmail available at "www.sendmail.org." Help is also available at "spam.abuse.net." Another good strategy is to use Internet tools such as whois and traceroute to find which ISP is serving your problem site. Notify the postmaster or abuse (abuse@offending-domain.example) address that they have an offender. Be sure to pass on all header information in your messages to help them with tracking down the offender. If they have a policy against using their service to post unsolicited mail they will need more than just your say-so that there is a problem. Also, the "originating" site may be a victim of the offender as well. It's not unknown for those sending this kind of mail to bounce their mail through dial-up accounts, or off unprotected mail servers at other sites. Use caution and courtesy in your approach to those who look like the offender. News spammers use similar techniques for sending spam to the groups. They have been known to forge headers and bounce posts off "open" news machines and remailers to cover their tracks. During the height of the infamous David Rhodes "Make Money Fast" posts, it was not unheard of for students to walk away from terminals which were logged in, and for sneaky folks to then use their accounts to forge posts, much to the later embarrassment of both the student and the institution. One way to lessen problems is to avoid using mail-to URLs on your web pages. They allow email addresses to be easily harvested by those institutions grabbing email addresses off the web. If you need to have an email address prevalent on a web page, consider using a cgi script to generate the mailto address. Participate in mailing lists and news groups which discuss unsolicited mail/posts and the problems associated with it. News.admin.net-abuse.misc is probably the most well-known of these.Hambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 11]RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 19996. What's an ISP to Do As an Internet Service Provider, you first and foremost should decide what your stance against unsolicited mail and posts will be. If you decide not to tolerate unsolicited mail, write a clear Acceptable Use Policy which states your position and delineates consequences for abuse. If you state that you will not tolerate use of your resource for unsolicited mail/posts, and that the consequence will be loss of service, you should be able to cancel offending accounts relatively quickly (after verifying that the account really IS being mis-used). If you have downstreaming arrangements with other providers, you should make sure they are aware of any policy you set. Likewise, you should be aware of your upstream providers' policies. Consider limiting access for dialup accounts so they cannot be used by those who spew. Make sure your mail servers aren't open for mail to be bounced off them (except for legitimate users). Make sure your mail transfer agents are the most up-to-date version (which pass security audits) of the software. Educate your users about how to react to spew and spewers. Make sure instructions for writing rules for mailers are clear and available. Support their efforts to deal with unwanted mail at the local level - taking some of the burden from your system administrators. Make sure you have an address for abuse complaints. If complainers can routinely send mail to "abuse@BigISP.example" and you have someone assigned to read that mail, workflow will be much smoother. Don't require people complaining about spam to use some unique local address for complaints. Read and use 'postmaster' and 'abuse'. We recommend adherence to RFC 2142, _Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions._ [7]. Finally, write your contracts and terms and conditions in such language that allows you to suspend service for offenders, and so that you can impose a charge on them for your costs in handling the complaints their abuse generates and/or terminating their account and cleaning up the mess they make. Some large ISPs have found that they can fund much of their abuse prevention staff by imposing such charges. Make sure all your customers sign the agreement before their accounts are activated. There is a list of "good" Acceptable Use Policies and Terms of Service at: http://spam.abuse.net/goodsites/index.html. Legally, you may be able to stop spammers and spam relayers, but this is certainly dependent on the jurisdictions involved. Potentially, the passing of spam via third party computers, especially if theHambridge & Lunde Informational [Page 12]RFC 2635 DON'T SPEW June 1999
⌨️ 快捷键说明
复制代码
Ctrl + C
搜索代码
Ctrl + F
全屏模式
F11
切换主题
Ctrl + Shift + D
显示快捷键
?
增大字号
Ctrl + =
减小字号
Ctrl + -