[tor-relays] German company Webtropia: Terminated contract without notice because of abuse

[tor at t-3.net]

IMO, even relaying SMTP-like for the email which typically requires 
auth first isn't a great idea if there is any concern about an 
upstream getting abuse complaints about a relay (such as a leased 
box).

A frequent way that spammers get their garbage out these days is to 
compromise a user account, I say this as a mail server admin who has 
to deal with the mess regularly. Oftentimes they guess the PW via 
dictionary attacks, but sometimes they keylog the user's box to get 
the email login.

If the spammer has compromised an account and is forced to use webmail 
to dump the spam instead of an SMTP-like means, your relay doesn't 
show up in the email headers in the same way and may even be 
obfuscated. The differences are good things if you want to minimize 
abuse complaints of this sort. Also the SMTP-like sending seems to get 
more spam out the door faster than something which must use webmail 
instead.


 On 07/30/2014 03:08 PM, krishna e bera wrote:
 > On 14-07-30 05:11 AM, tor at t-3.net wrote:
 >>
 >> You somewhat made a mistake here - you've got to have an exit 
policy
 >> that (minimally) rejects ports 25 and 465, or else your relay 
becomes
a
 >> giant abuse tool for spammers, scammers, and phishers instead of 
what
 >> you intended it to be (which was a standard-functioning Tor 
relay).
 >>
 >> You might try telling your ISP that you made a mistake in your
 >> configuration which allowed spam email to go out, and you're 
willing
to
 >> correct that error and move forward.
 >>
 >>
 >> ExitPolicy reject *:25
 >> ExitPolicy reject *:465
 >
 > Most SMTP servers i have seen listening on port 465 and 587 require
 > authentication, so it shouldnt be necessary to block those ports.  
Can
 > anyone name some that dont need authentication to send email?
 >
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