Email hosed - bet I'm not the only one!

[Alexander Henry]

Lynn David Newton wrote:

>This morning I just happened to notice that my mail queue was backing up.
>After a little looking around, I read an email message from Cox sent a
>couple of days ago saying that starting today they were going to "improve"
>service with a filter that would block all email sent to 3rd party outgoing
>SMTP mail servers. Huh??? My mail has always gone out, and as far as I know
>I have been using smtp.west.cox.net, and have no reason not to do so. 
>
My previous ISP, because I had no broadband service to my house, was 
Qwest dialup.  This was my pre-Linux time, I just used Netscape for 
e-mail.  When Cox gave us broadband, I immediately switched.  I canceled 
Qwest, and created a new user in Netscape to handle the new e-mail 
account.  Get this:  for more than a year after this, I was able to 
recieve and send e-mail through this unpaid Qwest account.  So I was 
accessing Qwest's [stmp|pop] (forgot) through Cox.

Off the top of my head, this may be handy for a spammer in that they can 
create dozens of e-mail accounts, say on Juno or Roadrunner or Qwest or 
whoever, then create one Cox account, and spam through all the third 
party services.  Slowly each of the third party ISP's will cancel the 
account, but the spammer has dozens of others to make up for it.  It 
wouldn't be hard to imagine a tool that keeps track of addresses 
successfully sent and not sent as well.  The spam content will probably 
contain a different Cox business website where they could buy the 
product, just in case the spam-center account might be cancelled.

Be glad I'm a whitehat.  :-P

--Alexander