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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Vonage Hits ISP Resistance
No, but if your car doesn't have seat belts, we don't let you drive it. Basic SMTP lacks safety features that are needed, ergo, retrictions were placed on it.Basic SMTP is fine. You all use it today. I will use it to send this message. SMTP is not better or worse than the postal service in identifying the sender and we have lived with the possability of fraudulent mail for centuries. Yes and no. It is significantly different from the postal service in that the arrival of postal spam costs me nothing. The additional bandwidth it consumes does not delay my other email or interfere with other uses I have for my household. It doesn't prevent my postal mail from getting out to others. It has the additional advantage of actually costing the sender something, thus reducing the number of senders. People have this idiotic expectation that because the mail is being delivered by a computer rather than a postie that the identity of the sender is somehow magically authenticated. I don't think this is particularly true. I think that the bigger issue is sender pays (postal spam) vs. recipient pays (email spam). The real issue is that it is hard to police customer machines and it is cheeper to turn off SMTP than it is to identify, inform and help fix customer machines. Sooner or later ISPs will have to start doing this as the people compromising machines have shown a long history of getting around all the blocks put in their way. Spam is just a minor annoyance compared to what they could potentially be doing with the compromised machines. True... One of these days, I keep hoping that people will wake up and demand less vulnerable operating systems for their machines. Until that happens (and no, the changes Micr0$0ft has made recently don't really create an improvement in this situation, as, their blockades are so obnoxious and so hard to selectively work around that most users just turn them off completely), this will continue to be an issue. The reason, however, so many of these machines are being used for spam instead of other nefarious purposes is that there is more money in spam at the moment. Owen -- If this message was not signed with gpg key 0FE2AA3D, it's probably a forgery. Attachment:
pgp00022.pgp
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