@nitpicking admiring is admitting it, IMHO.

@briankrebs

Always avoided them and wise to do so. Like using the web host to register you domain, a problem when you gotta move.

@briankrebs AMEN. Also Cloud providers need to reign in trial accounts from sending emails outside of their domain until they are a verified business.

@briankrebs
this assumes

many isps themselves didn't:
a) enter the game with criminal ambition

b) just didn't toss up their handsand surrender to the overwhelming 'internet is for scams' modern times.

c) something else

@briankrebs Yes, but...

The email accounts at Google and Microsoft are also constantly used for bad stuff. But because they're giant monoliths you can't just block them, and they have no real incentive to fix anything. That these accounts are "legitimate users" rather than compromised accounts doesn't make any difference to the harm they do.

The odds of getting an issue fixed at a regional ISP is significantly higher than it is at Google or Microsoft.

Also, any continued IMAP support that doesn't make it easy to incorporate 2FA or other things really doesn't help.

@briankrebs this is a golden post! 5*

@briankrebs And ISP email accounts are functionally useless and a pain.

In my youth I rented multiple apartments, moving every few years. Each time I would have to setup a new internet connection with a different ISP. I could not take my previous ISP email address with me.

that is why Yahoo, Hotmail, and the like were more popular.

@briankrebs a few grandmas might be confused but it would be worth it

@briankrebs I can't remember the last time I saw a legitimate email from an ISP based email account. I'm sure anyone else who has to deal with a lot of bad email see's the same thing.

@briankrebs not just giving away email accounts; creating them whether you want them or not.

@briankrebs cool thanks for the tips there! I’ll check out Security Onion. Unfortunately my consumer router can’t do port mirroring, so I’m thinking to put the linux server between the router and the upstream connection to see what’s going on, hope security onion can work with that setup. Thanks again!