[clug] mail problem on bigpond

[Alex Satrapa]

On 15 Aug 2005, at 12:52, Stephen Rothwell wrote:

> Yeah, but then you can filter them.  You could, for instance, throttle
> them, or scan them for virsuses, or ban them if they send too many  
> emails
> in a specified period ...

Though with the number of Windows PCs that have been turned into spam  
zombies, this will get harder and harder. I was watching a friend  
connect her brand new, reinstalled-from-scratch PC to the Internet on  
the weekend, and in less time than it took to say, "Have you  
installed Service Pack 2?" a Windows Messenger dialog box popped up  
saying that the user "must" download in important security update  
from some site that I don't recognise, my friend (bless her poor  
naive soul) had typed that URL by hand into Internet Explorer, and  
the machine's TX traffic had jumped to 100% of available bandwidth.

Users these days! You just turn around for a second to make a cup of  
tea, and they've gone and messed everything up! Who needs children to  
give you nightmares, when all those friends with Windows PCs are so  
much worse? Who needs viruses to infect computers with your latest  
malware when you just have to tell the user to do it themselves? So  
much more efficient.

The worst part of the story? Explaining to the poor lady that it's  
going to take another few hours to reinstall the machine again from  
scratch (and this time it'll have Service Pack 2 installed, the  
firewall enabled, and Firefox + Thunderbird installed as default apps).

Of course, IMHO the ISP should be doing some minimal port blocking  
such as blocking the SMB ports (136-139, 445) at a minimum (inbound  
and outbound). If someone really wants to share their files and  
printers with the world, let them ask for the ports to be unblocked.  
Port 25 is one of those contentious ones - I support blocking it  
outgoing (if someone wants to receive SMTP connections, fine by me),  
and providing case-by-case unblocking (for those people who know what  
they're doing). Unless the ISP really messes up (or even worse, does  
a BigPond), I'm happy with using their relay.

Alex Satrapa             M: +61 4 0770 5332
grail at goldweb.com.au     W: http://homepage.mac.com/alexsatrapa