Relay Spam

Most (correctly-configured!) SMTP servers accept only mail messages meeting one of two criteria:

Prior to the introduction of the Domain Name System (DNS), it was common for mail servers to accept mail from anyone, for anyone; the server would then make best efforts to relay the mail to the mail-server of the appropriate mail-domain (possibly by passing the message on to another mail-server). Such a server is known as an 'open relay'.

Spammers routinely abuse open relays that they find, by pumping huge amounts of spam through them, often crashing them in the process. By addressing each message to a large number of users, they can send a relatively small number of messages to the relay, and reach a large number of in-boxes.

Jackpot masquerades as an open relay of this sort.

The spam sent to the relay is (in my experience) usually passed through an open proxy first, to help conceal the identity of the spammer. Proxies do not normally tamper with message-headers; consequently, the headers will show the origin of the spam as having been the proxy, despite that the owner of the proxy is guilty of little more than culpable cluelessness.

So most of the spam arriving at a Jackpot server will have been sent via an open proxy, and it will probably be impossible to trace it further back than that proxy, unless you can get the cooperation of the administrators of the proxy. This is generally not easy - they are often end-users, with little or no net.admin capability, and often no registered contact-details. If you want to LART the spam sent to your Jackpot, you may be able to get the proxy shut down or secured; you are unlikely to be able to get anyone to send you proxy logs, or information extracted from them (but do ask!).

If you do decide to LART, then you could have a lot of work - over the last 24 hours (September 29th, 2002), my Jackpot has received spam from 120 different open proxies (mostly a single spammer). However running a Jackpot server is an excellent thing to do even if you don't want to LART - here are the reasons: