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Re: SPEWS?

  • From: Greg A. Woods
  • Date: Fri Jun 21 00:55:40 2002

[ On Thursday, June 20, 2002 at 17:01:20 (-0400), David Charlap wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: SPEWS?
>
> Dan Hollis wrote:
> > 
> > Its my box, my hardware, my property. No one has an inherent right
> > to force speech on an unwilling recipient.
> 
> If you're installing a blacklist on a mail server you keep at home for
> yourself, then yes.
> 
> If you're running an ISP with thousands of customers, then you also have
> to deal with how you're impacting them.  Sure, it may still be your
> equipment, but that won't matter if you tick off your paying customers
> and they decide to cancel their accounts and go to your competitors.

You, or at least I, really don't want paying customers who demand to
receive e-mail from known spam sources and open relays.  They cost far
to much in support to be worthwhile keeping -- I'd much sooner keep the
good customers and get the support-heavy ones to go suck on some
competitor's pipe!

On the other hand a clever business person might want to set up two
mailers for their customers -- one normal spam-free one; and another for
those customers who want all their e-mail regardless of where it comes
from.  Maybe we can write up an RFC/BCP to define a standardized name
like "iwantspam" for the second one, and mailboxes could always exist
for every user on both servers and the users could choose to read from
either or both, and the expiry policy and quotas could be set a bit
lower on "iwantspam" one.  :-) That way everyone who was getting bounces
because they were using a spam-infested ISP would know to try sending to
their friends a the standard "iwantspam" subdomain (and they could phone
their friends to let them know legit e-mail was being sent there too! :-).

In any case the onus is still on the sender to correct the problem, and
after all they are paying the offending ISP for service too -- if
they're not getting service because the offending ISP would rather have
spammers than grandmas as customers then the best thing is for everyone
to block the offending ISP's netblocks so that both grandma and the
spammers will get the message that their service provider is no longer
worth using.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <[email protected]>;  <[email protected]>;  <[email protected]>
Planix, Inc. <[email protected]>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <[email protected]>