Awesome

The Jabber Spam Fighting Manifesto

Version 0.8, 2018-04-07

The Jabber network (a federated set of thousands of servers with many tens or hundreds thousands of users) is under a continuous flood of spam messages for multiple years. Similar to the open email relays of the mid-1990s, public (and often abandoned) XMPP servers are being abused to deliver those messages.

We, as the operators of public XMPP servers, commit to the following Server Policies to fight spam on our servers, and we announce our intent to block incoming communication from public servers that distribute spam messages and do not react to abuse reports. Furthermore, we will inform other Public Server operators and the general public of domains sending spam and not reacting to abuse reports by keeping those servers on a public blacklist.

Server Policies

A Public Server is an XMPP server that allows both the registration of accounts by third parties (either via In Band Registration or by other means, like a web form), and federation to other XMPP servers, making it possible for its users to reach out to other XMPP domains.

The operators of a Public Server shall perform the following actions to fight spam:

• Provide an abuse contact according to XEP-0157: Contact Addresses for XMPP Services and react to incoming abuse reports in a timely fashion.

• Limit the number of new user registrations per IP address per hour.

• Monitor and review registrations from IP addresses with bad reputation (open proxy servers, Tor exit nodes), OR enforce additional checks on those users, for example by requesting a CAPTCHA or verifying the user's phone number.

• Throttle the traffic from local clients, especially unsolicited subscription requests and messages.

Schedule

With our signature under this Manifesto, we assure that our servers are already following the above stated Server Policies.

Starting with July 1st, 2018, we will start blocking incoming server connections from Public Servers not following the Server Policies above, if those are forwarding spam messages to our users. The blocking message will contain a reference to this Manifesto.

Commitment

Signed,

• Ave Ozkal, Luna Mendes, a3.pm (https://a3.pm/xmpp.html)
• Thomas Camaran, chatme.im (https://chatme.im/)
• Mathias Ertl, jabber.at (https://jabber.at)
• Emmanuel Gil Peyrot, Mathieu Pasquet, jabber.fr (https://jabberfr.org)
• Stian B. Barmen jabber.no (https://www.jabber.no/)
• Oxpa, Ermine, jabber.ru (https://jabber.ru/)
• Rafal Zawadzki, jabberpl.org (https://jabberpl.org)
• Sven Sperling, jabbers.one (https://jabbers.one)
• Marco Cirillo, lightwitch.org (https://lightwitch.org)
• Nico Wellpott magicbroccoli.de (https://magicbroccoli.de/xmpp/)
• Carlos Lopez, parloteo.es (https://parloteo.es)
• Carlos Lopez, suchat.org (https://www.suchat.org)
• Tsukasa Hamano, xmpp.jp (https://www.xmpp.jp/)
• Georg Lukas, yax.im (https://yaxim.org/yax.im/)
• ... (ordered by server name)

If you run a public Jabber server and commit to the above Policies, please sign the manifesto by opening a PR with your name, server domain and a URL of the service description.