North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: potentially profitable spam countermeasures

  • From: Greg A. Woods
  • Date: Fri Oct 31 14:37:18 1997

[ On Fri, October 31, 1997 at 10:47:20 (-0500), Peter E. Giza wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: potentially profitable spam countermeasures
>
> My bucks worth.  The *real* issue is that spam steals bandwidth by
> using more than an "average" users worth of bandwidth.  Postal systems
> the world over have a simple solution, one must buy a stamp first.  I
> am not advocating an email "pay before you use policy", however if one
> were to look at the number of out-going messages that a "typical"
> email user generates on any given day it likely on the order of <100.
> Given this, if everyone's AUP stated that unless negotiated by said
> user and ISP previously, that all out-going email exceeding <some
> number> would be subject to a bulk mail charge of $X.X per message.

Lots of ISPs seem to have such limits stated in their AUPs already but
many don't seem to have a decent way of enforcing them.  To that end I
recently added the first part of a control that does just exactly that
to smail.  It'll be in the next beta release.  Of course a belligerent
spammer could still open many more consecutive (and concurrent)
connections to the relay host to try to bypass such limits but such
attempts will hopefully be far more visible to operators watching out
for trouble, and more advanced solutions could be implemented with
relative ease as well.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734      VE3TCP      <[email protected]>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[email protected]>; Secrets of the Weird <[email protected]>