Answers To My Prayers

MITIGATING SPAM IN TM NETWORK

Dear valued customers,

Telekom Malaysia Berhad wishes to inform its customers about TM’s initiative in combating spam in its Internet Protocol (IP) network to improve our quality of service.

Recently, many anti-spam organizations have blacklisted a large number of IP addresses from TM’s network. Due to this many customers have been unable to send emails from their mail server to companies who might be using database from the above mentioned anti-spam organizations.

These spamming activities by a small group have affected a large number of our customers, regardless of the nature of their Internet usage. .

Therefore, TM is taking immediate action to address this issue. Effective 3 December 2007, TM will block OUTBOUND Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) traffic or port 25 for all out going e-mails from dynamic IP addresses. Only Outbound SMTP traffic from smtp.streamyx.com and smtp.tm.net.my will be allowed.

With this implementation, Streamyx customers who have their own mail server will not be able to send e-mails. As an alternative, TM is providing an open relay server for these customers who use dynamic IP addresses. Kindly refer to http://webmail.tm.net.my/info/proxy.html on how to configure your email client in order to utilize this relay server. Alternatively, your e-mail administrators can refer to http://webmail.tm.net.my/info/smtp-proxy.html as a guide to configure your company’s email servers.

Please be assured that TM is proactively taking all possible measures to ensure that these spamming activities do not reoccur in the future. We seek your kind co-operation to implement the necessary security measures to protect your computers that are connected to the Internet from any e-mail abuse, virus infection, spyware and malicious code.

For further enquiries and assistance, email us at help@tm.com.my or call TM at 100 and select ‘Internet Services’.

Why didn't I receive this notification earlier? WTF. Bah, and my stupid web-hosters didn't even bother to inform me about this issue.

TMnet recently blocked port 25 for SMTP to reduce spamming problem. Malaysian users have been using TMnet SMTP Server as a base to launch their spamming, which resulted in our TMnet and Streamyx domain-emails being blocked by overseas' ISP, causing our bacons (wanted mails) being blocked too.

But why are people spamming? Spamming are regarded as unwanted or unsubscribed advert being sent into your mailbox. Company who wished to advertise themselves are paying heaps to get known to sell their products and services. I've heard people who are spammer by night, earned at least USD$2k by just sending spams at home.

HmMmm, still trying to get port 26 to work... PSF is due tomorrow. Die me! ._.

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Updated (24th March 2008, 10:36pm):

I solved it.

To those who experienced the same problem, here is the link to fix this error.

Two words to sum up my conclusion to my 5th out of the 5 experiences dealing with the computer technicians in Malaysia - fu8king lousy.