Re: Spammer Bust

[Russ Haynal <russ () navigators com>]

At 04:35 PM 9/5/97 -0400, Jeremy Elson wrote:
> I had two very similar incidents of PSI not knowing what was going on. 
> I've gotten a lot of spam that originated from PSI dialup users but using
> Earthlink as a mail relay; for example, this one:

Recognize that Earthlink is a "national" provider by virtue of the fact
that its customers are allowed to connect through PSI and UUNEt POPs (and
other ISP's POPs?).  Just last week I established an Earthlink dial-up
acount for one of my relatives.  Many of the Earthlink POP phone numbers
turned out to be Phone numbers belonging to PSI, UUNET.  It was interesting
that the PPP Dial-up logon user ID was of the form: "ELN/userid"   The
"ELN/" in front of the userid stands for Earthlink Network, so that
PSI/UUNET knows to which ISP to route the particular dial-up user.

I would suggest that your particular Spammer IS an Earthlink User, (who
happens to dial-in through a PSI POP)  In this instance, I guess PSI would
have to be considered "just an innocent carrier" like the local phone
company that also helps the Spammer reach his ISP (Earthlink)

[One alternative thought, (and it's a messy one)... Most ISP's can restrict
their mail gateways to accept their customers only, but I wonder if
Earthlink would be able to configure its mail server to prohibit customers
of PSI's and UUNEt's Dial-up services from using Earthlink's mail server.]

Russ



__________________________________________________________________
      Russ Haynal - Internet Consultant, Instructor, Speaker 
  "Helping organizations gain the most benefit from the Internet" 
russ () navigators com     http://navigators.com     703-729-1757
------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Author:"Internet; A Knowledge Odyssey" (Top-rated CD-ROM Tutorial) 
      Available from MindQ Publishing: http://www.mindq.com