> On Apr 4, 2023, at 12:42 PM, Jarland Donnell via mailop <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I feel like I've told this story before on the list, but I can't recall. It > always feels worth telling. > > When I worked at DigitalOcean I took what felt like a year (may have been > less) and I focused more energy than any one person probably ever has at any > cloud provider on tackling spammers based on abuse complaints and recognition > of patterns recognized from investigating abuse complaints. I had Python > scripts running through the customer database at one point looking for key > indicators and would mass shut down accounts either before they started to > spam, or not very long after. No false positives. I would shut down a ton of > accounts every day to zero complaints, because they were all exactly what I > knew they were and they knew what they were doing. I had video meetings with > several frequent complainers who would come at us from social media angles to > inform them of how their complaints were informing my work, and what I was > doing to try to reduce their complaints. > > Despite all of that, I don't think I ever succeeded in even reducing the > complaints. The only way to tackle this successfully at a cloud provider, in > my opinion, is to block SMTP traffic and only unblock it under certain > conditions. There will never be enough humans as dedicated and capable as I > was, without raising prices to the point that it drives customers and > spammers to the clouds that aren't spending that kind of money on abuse > handling, to make a difference. > > Just my 2c.
Jarland, I see your point. And with that much abuse it doesn’t seem unreasonable to block SMTP traffic by default. Perhaps there’d be a process of getting it turned on but with some vetting. Anyway, now I kind of understand why so much is coming out of DO. They are trying to bail out a class 5 rapids with a bucket. I wonder why they don’t look at SMTP? This massive, expensive yet inadequate system doesn’t seem likely to be in DO’s interest. Where’s the benefit to DO to do things this way? Just curious. Neil _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list [email protected] https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
