North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Fun new policy at AOL

  • From: Matthew Crocker
  • Date: Thu Aug 28 14:15:21 2003


Shouldn't customers that purchase IP services from an ISP use the ISPs
mail server as a smart host for outbound mail?
Shouldn't. There are privacy implications of having mail to be recorded
(even temporarily) at someone's disk drive.

If your ISP violates your privacy or has a privacy policy you don't like, find another one.
If your ISP doesn't allow your domain through, attachments of a certain size or quantity of RCPT TOs, find another one.
If the ISP is too restrictive you can't do what you want, find another one
If the ISP isn't restrictive and your IP gets black holed because of another customer, find another one.
The market will decide what is acceptable.

I filter a chunk of stuff for my users. It is a service to help protect them as well as me. If they ask for and appear to have a clue I will remove filters for customers. I'll never force them to do it 'my way or the highway' but by default customers are filtered. 99% of them are happy that I am doing it and think it is a good thing. 1% call and I remove the filters. Simple RADIUS update and they are back to full, unfiltered Internet. I do this on all my dialup, DSL, dedicated circuits. Everything is built from either LDAP or RADIUS (which comes from LDAP anyway) information about the customer. Pull down menu to select/deselect a filter and reconnect. It isn't all that hard and for 99% of my customers I am saving myself a ton of work in the long run.

I'm not huge by any stretch of the imagination but I'm pretty good sized for my area. I think my current network design/management could easily scale to the 100's of thousands and/or millions of customers. I'm in the 10's of thousands now.

-Matt