Thursday, March 22, 2007
Advice to an unwilling spammer host
I reported a spam to an email admin at an Indian reservation. He replied with a nice thank you note. His technician has been trying to stop the spam coming out of their MSFT system for a few days, with no success. I offer general advice:
Hi Justin, thanks.
I hope you won't mind some unsolicited general advice about the problem.
You're using a Microsoft system for your exposed email server. That's going to be an ongoing headache. Believe it or not, and despite everything you have read in the trade press and heard from Microsoft's sales force, their operating system is not designed to be exposed (on a "routable" address) directly to the Internet.
The customers Microsoft listens to, that they design their system for, are the Fortune 500 corporations. Consumers, small business, and distributors like Dell and Gateway, are taken for granted, because they have been taught they "have no choice." Their (our) needs are not considered in Microsoft's design decisions. Fortune 500 corporations do not expose Microsoft systems to the Internet. They hide them behind layers of protection: proxy servers, firewalls, "policy servers," and other equipment.
You would be wise to start thinking about placing some non-Microsoft system between your exposed address and your internal Microsoft email system, to relay email in and out, and be a firewall. PCs are very cheap now. You can put a PC running FreeBSD or GNU+Linux between the Internet and your private network for less than you spend on "anti-virus" junk for a few MSFT machines. The PC you retired because it wasn't fast enough to run Windows XP very well will usually do. You can stop the "virus" email and 90% of the incoming spam with it, as well as the criminals who compromised your current system.
It takes a bigger PC to run today's comprehensive spam and virus filters, but even a serious compute engine only costs a few hundred bucks these days, and all the software you need to do it is truly free and trustworthy.
A painless and risk-free first step down this road is to try a couple of "Live Linux" CDs. These let you temporarily run a fully functional computer system on your current PC, directly off the CD, without disturbing your current software installation and without installing anything. I recommend Knoppix.net, but Ubuntulinux.org is more popular. If you have an older, smaller PC, you might try damnsmalllinux.org instead.
--
Best wishes,
Me in San José
http://greens.org/nnn/
Hi Justin, thanks.
I hope you won't mind some unsolicited general advice about the problem.
You're using a Microsoft system for your exposed email server. That's going to be an ongoing headache. Believe it or not, and despite everything you have read in the trade press and heard from Microsoft's sales force, their operating system is not designed to be exposed (on a "routable" address) directly to the Internet.
The customers Microsoft listens to, that they design their system for, are the Fortune 500 corporations. Consumers, small business, and distributors like Dell and Gateway, are taken for granted, because they have been taught they "have no choice." Their (our) needs are not considered in Microsoft's design decisions. Fortune 500 corporations do not expose Microsoft systems to the Internet. They hide them behind layers of protection: proxy servers, firewalls, "policy servers," and other equipment.
You would be wise to start thinking about placing some non-Microsoft system between your exposed address and your internal Microsoft email system, to relay email in and out, and be a firewall. PCs are very cheap now. You can put a PC running FreeBSD or GNU+Linux between the Internet and your private network for less than you spend on "anti-virus" junk for a few MSFT machines. The PC you retired because it wasn't fast enough to run Windows XP very well will usually do. You can stop the "virus" email and 90% of the incoming spam with it, as well as the criminals who compromised your current system.
It takes a bigger PC to run today's comprehensive spam and virus filters, but even a serious compute engine only costs a few hundred bucks these days, and all the software you need to do it is truly free and trustworthy.
A painless and risk-free first step down this road is to try a couple of "Live Linux" CDs. These let you temporarily run a fully functional computer system on your current PC, directly off the CD, without disturbing your current software installation and without installing anything. I recommend Knoppix.net, but Ubuntulinux.org is more popular. If you have an older, smaller PC, you might try damnsmalllinux.org instead.
--
Best wishes,
Me in San José
http://greens.org/nnn/
