Re: Spam over Tor

[Mike Cardwell <tor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* on the Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 01:11:06PM +0100, Lexi Pimenidis wrote:

>> I disagree with that. There still has been no spam over Tor in the
>> scenario you described. Rather someone has logged into a system over
>> Tor and used _that_ system to send spam. I'm not saying Tor would not
>> have been used in any way by the person in this scenario. I am saying
>> that no spam was sent over Tor in what you described. You could also
>> claim by your logic to have shown that the statement that there is no
>> spam over HTTPS is history. 
> Following your argument: even if someone would use Tor to send Spam via
> SMTP you could say it was not "Spam over Tor", since he used a mail
> relay to send the Spam. Still, using SMTP it would be generally
> considered "Spam over Tor".

"Spam over Tor" is meaningless anyway. In the same way that, "Spam over
IP," or, "Spam over TCP," or, "Spam over keyboard," would be meaningless.

The issue is, which host is responsible for the last SMTP hop over the
Internet. The only time that you can say that Tor is responsible for a
spam message is if there is a direct connection from a host hidden by
the Tor network, to one of the MXs of the recipient. I've not heard of
this happening.

If you use a webmail system to send a spam, it is the webmail system
that is responsible for it. It is irrelevant how you connected to that
webmail system. If you connect to an SMTP relay to send your spam, then
it is the relay that is responsible for it.

Mike