Re: abused webmail

[Jure Peèar <pegasus@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 18:28:06 +0200
Pavel Urban <urbanp@xxxxxx> wrote:

> Unfortunately, no. These guys are real users using legitimate accounts 
> and resources. Because this is freemail, they can (and do) register 
> hundreds of accounts and use them. Of course, we can prohibit account 
> creation from outside our country, but we find this solution suboptimal.

I understand you. I also admin a large webmail, which is a regular target of
spammers. Unlike you, we run one of the opensource webmails to which we've
added some traps:

* open proxy check in login form: if your IP is on one of the blacklists, no
mail for you

* monitor the number of recipients per single mail; log all that are above a
certain number

* monitor all the new registrations and check for suspicious IPs.

This and a near 24/7 monitoring is showing results: spammers are still
logging in, but those IPs not in blacklists are added to local firewall; any
spamming attempt is usualy seen within 10minutes, spammer blocked and queues
cleaned up.

My feeling is that once your webmail gets known on various spammer boards as
'business friendly', you get hordes of nigerian scammers and lotteries
abusing you. Then you have hell of a time getting rid of them...

I'd also like to hear how other webmail admins are dealing with the problem.


-- 

Jure Pe�