North American Network Operators Group

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Re: SORBS Contact

  • From: Allan Poindexter
  • Date: Wed Aug 09 17:53:09 2006

  Laurence> End users ought not to have the functionality of email
  Laurence> destroyed because originating SP's won't show due
  Laurence> diligence in preventing abuse of the network.

This is crisis mongering of the worst sort.  Far more damage has been
done to the functionality of email by antispam kookery than has ever
been done by spammers.  I have one email address that has:

  Existed for over a decade.

  Been posted all over Usenet and the Web in unmangled form.

  Only three letters so it gets spam from the spammers that send
  copies to every possible short address.

  All blacklisting turned off because that was causing too much mail
  to go into a black hole.

In short it should be one of the worst hit addresses there is.  All I
have to do to make it manageable is run spamassassin over it.  That is
the mildest of several measures I could use to fix the "spam problem".
If it became truly impossible I could always fall back to requiring an
address of the form "apoindex+<password>" and blocking all the one's
that don't match the password(s).  That would definitely fix the
problem and doesn't require any pie in the sky re-architecting of the
entire Internet to accomplish.

For almost a decade now I have listened to the antispam kooks say that
spam is going to be this vast tidal wave that will engulf us all.
Well it hasn't.  It doesn't show any sign that it ever will.  In the
meantime in order to fix something that is at most an annoyance people
in some places have instigated draconian measures that make some mail
impossible to deliver at all or *even in some case to know it wasn't
delivered*.  The antispam kooks are starting to make snail mail look
good.  It's pathetic.

The functionality of my email is still almost completely intact.  The
only time it isn't is when some antispam kook somewhere decides he
knows better than me what I want to read.  Spam is manageable problem
without the self appointed censors.  Get over it and move on.