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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: surge in spam email (fwd)
[ On Wednesday, August 9, 2000 at 15:46:37 (-0400), Barry Shein wrote: ] > Subject: Re: surge in spam email (fwd) > > On the other hand they've been at this relay-blocking stuff for years > and spam just goes up and up and the spam technology gets better and > better. > > That's the problem, sounds good, no measurables. It all stands on a > sales pitch, basically. True enough. Though I would contend that if even a very few of the major e-mail providors stood up and backed ORBS (or something almost identical to it) that the ability of spammers to send their sales pitches for free would be severely squelched. Unfortunately ORBS is ineffective in closing open relays because it doesn't cost most open relays enough to leave their broken systems lying about. It's a chicken & egg situation -- if all of the real legitimate e-mail from known open relays was blocked then they'd quickly fix their systems but everyone's playing chicken and nobody wants to stand up in front of the users and tell them they're not allowed to receive any e-mail, legitimate or not, from any known open relay. Some providers say they'll lose customers if they do this (and they may), while others say they'll face an enormous support overload. I think if *everyone* stood up at once and declared that open relays were bad for us all then there wouldn't be too much trouble because there'd be nowhere for frustrated customers to jump to! ;-) > We need laws, there are thus far no viable technical solutions to > spam, and any claim otherwise is IMHO acting in the spammers' > interests (since a legislator would love to punt on the belief that we > just need to close a few more relays and the problem is solved.) > > Anyhow: Where are the measurables? Laws? Global laws? Where are you going to get those from? Though as a technical solution something like ORBS might not be perfect, and of course it can only react as fast as its users, but any technical solution seems far more attractive than local, unenforcable, laws! Now if we had laws against open relays that might be a different story.... :-) -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[email protected]> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <[email protected]>; Secrets of the Weird <[email protected]>
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