Why not go after bots? (was: ingress SMTP)

• From: Michael Thomas
• Date: Wed Sep 03 19:48:25 2008

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I have SBC / AT&T / Yahoo DSL in Southern California and they block outbound 25 to anything but Yahoo SMTP server farm, and they only allow SSL
connectivity at that. I'm all for that personally.

That seems to be the convention wisdom, but the science experiment
as it were in blocking port 25 doesn't seem to be correlated (must
less causated) with any drop in the spam rate. Because so far as I've
heard there isn't any such drop. Spammers and the rest are pretty
resourceful.

So I still haven't heard why there isn't any emphasis on going after
the bots that are by far the biggest problem instead of erecting damage
for them to route around. I can sort of understand why providers are
leery of getting sucked into that battle, but it's got to cost them a
fortune for every "My internet is slow" call they take.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Why not go after bots? (was: ingress SMTP) Suresh Ramasubramanian
  • Re: Why not go after bots? Charles Wyble

• References:
  • ingress SMTP *Hobbit*
  • Re: ingress SMTP Charles Wyble

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