Gnutella remailers

Eric Murray ericm at lne.com
Tue Sep 4 10:28:59 PDT 2001


On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 01:21:16PM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 10:42:19PM -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
> > I believe Ian Goldberg came up with a rather elegant solution: allow the 
> > the clients to only function as entry and middlemen remailers and use 
> > throwaway accounts at hotmail or similar fall guys as the exit points.
> 
> Maybe, but it's vulnerable to a few things, I'd wager, if you're talking
> about writing a client that would log in to a web-based mail service
> and then send mail from within it:
> 
> * Automated monitoring by Hotmail/Yahoo/Lycos Mail/etc. If an account
> usually sends 10 messages/day, look for spikes in traffic two standard
> deviations above the mean and temporarily block access to that account.
> Or require human intervention to re-enable that account.
> 
> * Anti-spam monitoring, similar to the above. What a remailer (who
> logs into the service and and sends mail from within it, rather than
> forging the From: line) would do is what a lot of spammers would like
> to do too.


One could instead bounce the traffic through the same mail servers
that spammers use.  Judging from the spam I get, most of those
are poorly-admined sites thast don't know that they're being
used to forward spam. 

Of course this isn't very moral. 


Eric





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