> I don’t have control over other Linode customers, guys!
You do have control over being a Linode customer though. If Linode isn't doing enough to prevent abuse, they deserve to be blocked.
You do have control over being a Linode customer though. If Linode isn't doing enough to prevent abuse, they deserve to be blocked.
Realistically, what can they do here? Make servers unaffordable to discourage abuse? Give most servers "Internet*" access where some ports are missing?
Disallow SMTP traffic unless an account has a certain reputation or verified identity related to it?
I mean, they don't have to do that, and I would agree the government shouldn't force it to happen. But if someone is constantly causing you problems you shouldn't be required to deal with their shit. If you don't want to behave, expect consequences from everyone else in society.
If every time my friends invited me over I brought over another random person that smears feces all over the walls and pees in the corner I probably won't get invited over very often. Linode (and other cheap VPS hosts) are that person constantly enabling abusive people and subjecting them to others.
Dumb question, but wtf is the solution even? I’m confused about what you expect us to do. I haven’t thought about the problem much so I might be missing some obvious Pareto improvement.
My main suggestion here is just that an established reputation for a specific IP/domain should override the reputation of the IP block it's inside of.
Thanks for clarifying, ok, hmm… that seems hard to do if you can check the IP block by using a subnet mask but the specific IP isn’t resolved until later in mailflow. It might not actually work like that in… ProtocolFilterHub? I always get this mixed up, wait… I think this might be something that we are already working on. And have been working on for a while, wow. Looks hairy. It’s stuck since the guy working on it transferred to another team, and no one picked it up, but some PM noticed before I did and put it up for vote in semester planning. Always creepy to see engineers get referred to as “resources”.
90% of the spam that I receive from a DMARC-validated sender comes from Google; should every Gmail user be punished because Google aren’t “doing enough”?
[0] Linode twice threatened to shut off services within 24 hours due to some vigilante scanning the internet with a broken virus scanner and automatically sending reports: https://virtuallyfun.com/2014/04/23/dumbass-of-the-year-awar... (n.b. this is not my site)
One instance of them supposedly responding quickly to an email abuse report isn't showing they're consistently responsive to abuse reports. I don't know if they are or are not. I don't even know that this blog post even refers to Linode, they're not mentioned once.
And its not true they always block outgoing SMTP by default. Loads of old accounts do not have SMTP blocked. New accounts since 2019 sometimes have it blocked, but given the last few times I've made an account and didn't have any blocks it doesn't seem that often. Maybe I just got lucky though.
And don't get me wrong here, I'm not intentionally singling out Linode here. There's loads of cheap VPS providers that enable this kind of abuse. They're not necessarily better or worse in this regard to many others.
> 90% of the spam that I receive from a DMARC-validated sender comes from Google; should every Gmail user be punished because Google aren’t “doing enough”?
Yes. Just like those telephone companies originating most of the spam phone calls should get disconnected. If they're going to enable abusers, they should get cut off.