Leading ISPs release guidelines to slow down spam
The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance, comprised of leading Internet service providers Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, EarthLink, Comcast and British Telecom, today released ten recommendations for e-mail providers to fight spam.
The group urges widespread adoption of its recommendations within a short period to begin making them effective, but it admits that its recommendations—contained in the “Anti-Spam Technical Alliance Technology and Policy Proposal”—will serve only as a beginning in the effort to rid e-mail systems of spam. “We fully recognize that this document does not provide all solutions to the spam problem and intend to update and enhance this statement of intent over time,” the group says. “However, we feel that our recommendations, if implemented on a large scale, can be successful in improving e-mail messaging and Internet communications in general.”
The recommendations include:
• Close all open relays, which are mail servers that allow third parties to relay e-mail through them without authentication. ISPs should test all remote mail servers to ensure they are not configured as open relays.
• Monitor e-mail-generating common gateway interface scripts, such as formmail.pl, which is commonly used in customer feedback forms on web sites. If installed insecurely, such scripts can be used by spammers to generate and send e-mail to anyone.
• Configure proxies for internal network use only. Open proxies can be used by third parties to send e-mail to anyone or to mount denial of service attacks or support other methods of hacking computers.
• Implement authenticated e-mail submission, deploying the authentication protocol SMTP AUTH with the password-encrypting protocol STARTTLS. Implement SMTP authentication on the standard Mail Submission Port 587.
“There is not one easy solution to the spam problem,” the group continues. “Solutions for handling spam are technically challenging and may take considerable time and effort to implement.” That’s why its recommendations include a mixture of ones that can be implemented quickly as well as others that will take more time to develop but have greater impact on ridding spam.
The complete report with all 10 recommendations, plus additional advice for e-mail senders and consumers, is available at AntiSpam.Yahoo.com as well as on the web sites of the other members of the alliance.
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