spam issues

[ronnie gauthier]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 14:00:44 -0600 - Andrew Mathews
<andrew_mathews at linux-works.org> wrote the following
Re: Re: spam issues

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>ronnie gauthier wrote:
>| I've had it with spam, RBL's bite. So what to do?
>| I have taken drastic measures. I wish others would follow suit. We
>could kill
>| spam in short order. How? I have got fed up with yahoo a while back
>and blocked
>| them. A while back I had a rash of spam from comcast.com and mail them and
>| complained heavily, it stopped. Until this week. Now comcast is blocked.
>| When I say blocked I dont mean filtered I mean blocked from all my
>domains and
>| clients mail servers. FSCK to domains with a lax attitude about spam,
>let them
>| eat bounces.
>| _______________________________________________
>| Linux-users mailing list
>| Linux-users at linux-sxs.org
>| Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc ->
>http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
>
>I attended the USENIX conference in San Antonio last month for the
>Sendmail seminar. Eric Allman (the author of Sendmail) said that in the
>near future we will see email become fragmentary and crippled due to the
>neglect by ISP's to adequately punish the spammers they're  providing
>services to, or condoning through their inaction. More and more people
>and companies will flatly refuse any mail from entire netblocks or
>domains which will cripple the ability of legitimate users to
>communicate with the rest of the world. The key is to inform those
>people of the exact reasoning why their ISP is "bad" and encourage them
>to use someone legitimate. If the ISP has no customers because they're
>blacklisted, the problem will become theirs, instead of ours.
>Personally, I encourage the use of blacklists, provided they're
>responsible, act quickly, and provide unbiased services that allow a
>problem to be fixed and remove the offender as quickly as they list
>them. Somewhere between allowing it all, and blocking it all is the
>happy medium, and it's going to be different for everyone.
>

I realize that I'm not alone in blocking domains and that it is mainly an act
of total frustration and completely unfair to the unculpable user. OTOH, as I
stated before, one domain...big deal...one hundred...BIG DEAL. blocked by one
domain and you will beleive your ISP when they say something wrong on the other
end. But if 50% of everything they send gets refused...then, well, the ISP
cannot say it is an outside problem any longer. That is a huge incentive not to
host spammers or to tolerate misuse of their system.