[tor-talk] Tor and Spamhaus.

[Jon Tullett]

On 19 August 2016 at 18:21, Friet Pan <frietpan at ymail.com> wrote:
>
> If all email clients had a whitelist option  until there is a better wway to fight spam then spammers would have at least a barrier...

But they don't, and there isn't. There have been many many suggested
"fixes" to SMTP, but most would fail because unless widely
implemented, they'd break email, and it's pretty damned fragile to
start with. Whitelisting, for example doesn't work for several
reasons. Greylisting works better, at the server or client level, but
didn't catch on and is often considered too much of a compromise on
usability.

Even SPF and DKIM had slow tentative starts, because operators were
very nervous about impacting reliability and usability. Now, of
course, it's the opposite; if you don't comply, you're effectively
shut out. And that's _mostly_ ok except for fringe cases, but if
you're one of those fringe cases then it unfortunately is a real pain.
That's a shame, but they're in such a tiny minority that no one who
matters, cares.

You won't change that approach now. For the vast majority of users,
right now, spam is a mostly solved problem. That's borne out by data:
spam levels have been decreasing for years now. So the operators won't
backtrack on what's working. Even so, there's no cartel or hidden
agenda. Just a broadly accepted community response to widespread abuse
- it's functionally the same as if they upgraded SMTP to a new version
that blocked out some servers who unfortunately aren't able to upgrade
and so can no longer exchange mail with them.

You can still run your own server, using the older version. It just
won't be able to talk to most other mail servers, especially not the
big public operators like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. But there's
nothing stopping a community of mail server operators setting up a
network of email hosts using older standards. Well, apart from the
inevitable spam and other abuse they'll have to deal with...

-J












>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Sat, 8/13/16, Jon Tullett <jon.tullett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Tor and Spamhaus.
>  To: tor-talk at lists.torproject.org
>  Date: Saturday, August 13, 2016, 8:22 PM
>
>  On 12 August 2016 at
>  14:18,  <blobby at openmailbox.org>
>  wrote:
>
>  > Question: why
>  does Spamhaus in particular target exit nodes?
>
>  Knowing Spamhaus, I'd
>  guess that they don't target exit nodes per se,
>  but rather that Tor has been used by spammers
>  which has resulted in
>  the block listings.
>  Getting them delisted will be exceptionally
>  difficult (since there's no guarantee the
>  spammers won't immediately
>  resume
>  business as usual).
>
>  -J
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