Re: email address probes

From: Axel Beckert - ecos gmbh (beckertat_private)
Date: Thu Feb 06 2003 - 09:30:15 PST

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    Hi!
    
    About tarpits and teergrubes:
    
    Am Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 06:04:44PM -0500, Greg A. Woods schrieb:
    > If the connections come fast and furious from the same remote server
    > then you can introduce a delay before you send your reject reply status
    > code, or even send a "550-User unknown" line, then pause for up to a
    > minute or two, and finally a "550 Thanks for trying!" line.  Some people
    > call this scheme a "tar pit" -- it slows down a rabid sender because it
    > forces it to wait for the last line of the multi-line 550 message.
    
    That's right. But this also has some side effects: The connection
    state for each hold connection must be stored somewhere in memory. If
    you have a lot of such connection, you may run out of memory in the
    tcp stack or so...
    
    Am Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 09:01:26PM -0500, Kee Hinckley schrieb:
    > The only solution I know of is to tarpit the server based on number
    > of bounces.  The more it bounces, the more slowly you get around to
    > handling responses from it.  I don't know of any off-the-shelf
    > solutions that to do that though. 
    
    There is a very fine teergrubing (from the German word for tarpit:
    Teergrube) FAQ from Lutz Donnerhacke at
    http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/usenet/teergrube.en.html or
    http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/teergrube-faq/
    
    There is also the answer to Kee's indirect question:
    
      Q: Are there any ready to use teergrubes available?
    
      A: http://www.de.spam.abuse.net/webland/spam/ especially Axel
         Zinser's patch at ftp://ftp.hiss.han.de/pub/sendmail/. Systems
         unable to receive e-mail can supplied with a special perl script
         from Boston Business Computing.
              
         I developed a general purpose wrapper to use in front of your
         MTA.
    
    Another question/answer pair is also very interesting:
    
      Q: Does anyone have any experience with teergrubing?
    
      A: Axel was able to hold a spammer online for more than two days. I
         have similar records.
              
         In thur.net.admin there is a daily statistics posting from a real
         teergrube.
    
    But the following thread (German only, sorry) shows that this tarpit
    doesn't run anymore because of too much administrative work needed:
    
    http://groups.google.de/groups?hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=2j0kb9.j97.ln%40news.lorenzmatthias.de&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Dde%26lr%3D%26ie%3DISO-8859-1%26q%3Dteergrube%26btnG%3DGoogle-Suche%26meta%3Dgroup%253Dthur.net.admin
    
                Kind regards, Axel Beckert
    -- 
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    Axel Beckert       ecos electronic communication services gmbh
    IT-Securitylösungen * dynamische Webapplikationen * Consulting
    
    Post:       Tulpenstrasse 5          D-55276 Dienheim b. Mainz
    E-Mail:     beckertat_private          Voice:   +49 6133 939-220
    WWW:        http://www.ecos.de/      Fax:     +49 6133 939-333
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