[tor-relays] Exit policy question

[Andy Isaacson]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 05:47:17PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 05:22:13PM +0000, George Gemelos wrote:
> >  Is there a further reduced set that might be better, in the sense
> >of avoiding complaints, and still remain useful as an exit node?
> 
> You could get your toes wet by "accept *:80, accept *:443, reject *:*".
> That would let people browse the web through you, which is very useful,
> while somewhat reducing the variety of abuse complaints you might get.
> 
> Then if it goes well for a while, you could open up a few more ports.
> 
> Also, if later your ISP decides that it's getting too much mail and asks
> you to quit it, you can tell them about the time you allowed only web
> browsing and they didn't mind -- then you have something to fall back
> to that isn't just being a non-exit.

Note that *:80, *:443 will still get a trickle of spam complaints, since
some webmail hosts (Yahoo in particular) include a "Received: from $IP
via HTTP" or equivalent, in their outbound email.  Depending on the ISP,
that may be enough for them to shut down your exit node.

If you can get reverse DNS and SWIP for your exit node, you'll reduce
(though not eliminate) the load on your ISP's abuse address.  Please do
respond to complaints submitted to your whois abuse address; it's to
nobody's benefit for Tor to be associated exclusively with malefactors
in the minds of spamfighters.

-andy