ISPs Teaming Up To Standardize Plans To Stop Zombies

from the enough-is-enough dept

Six large ISPs are now teaming up to take on the issue of zombie machines spewing spam. AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, Comcast, Microsoft and BT are all working together to come up with a standard way to fight spam zombies, but some of their plans may upset certain users. While it’s good to see them (finally) taking this issue seriously, one of the proposed solutions is to limit how many emails a customer can send out per hour or per day. While this is unlikely to be a problem for most users, it could cause problems for people who legitimately need to send out a large number of messages. Besides, as some have been suggesting, all this really means is that spammers will have incentive to get their software on even more machines in order to keep on spamming.


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Comments on “ISPs Teaming Up To Standardize Plans To Stop Zombies”

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4 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

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I can only see this working if the user is using his ISP-supplied Email account (which a spamming trojan isn’t) otherwise you’d have to be monitoring port 25 for SMTP traffic, which seems unlikely.

Most people use WebMail anyway (as they’re tired of Outlook giving them viruses) so it won’t affect many.

Something else needs to be done, like blocking spamming machines’ IPs and terminating accounts, not limiting Emails.

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