Today I came across the idea to blackhole spammers and open relays using BGP.
Despite the minor problems it may cause, it will help to solve a big problem.
Taking such aggressive actions like completely blocking a host or even a network for a whole week will make network administrators to take spam issue more serious. If someone forgot (or even worse, is unable) to secure his mail or proxy server, this is his problem not ours. And network administrators should know that they have to act against open relay and proxies in their network with high priority among their tasks.
Anyway, searching in google turned out that my genuine idea is not genuine at all and this is something that Paul Vixie has been working on it since 1997.
His efforts is available as MAPS. Beside their DNSBL service they also offer a BGP feed that does that same as I mentioned. Subscriptions is required to use these BGP feeds.
