Anti spam solutions

[Fraser Campbell]

On Wednesday 08 October 2003 15:30, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Ralph Doncaster wrote:
> > On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> > > You are going to hate this but drm and a democratic router policy
> > > voting system would fix this. The majority of users do not want spam,
> > > and they can force their ISPs and everyone whom they *do* *buy*
> > > bandwidth from to impose and maintain spam blocking rules. None of the
> > > major isps blocks spam at the routing level now (they should imho).
> >
> > The resource requirements to implement it compared to regular IP routing
> > make such a plan completely impractical.
>
> I thought it's easier to stem the flow at the bottleneck as opposed to
> when it is raining down on everyone. I did not say it would be cheap or
> easy. Someone has to pay for it too. Tax money probably, after enough
> people get sufficiently upset about spam and viruses. Which they about are
> now imho. I'd like to see what the US Congress comes up with wrt spam.

Many ISPs are taking measures to stem the flow.  Symaptico for examples forces 
all users to relay mail through a Sympatico server.  This makes tracking 
spammers significantly easier for Sympatico.  Whether they actually act on 
such information, or monitor it, I cannot be sure, anyone?

Rogers seem less active in the fight.  They require authentication of smtp 
connections but don't stop their customers from relaying directly to anywhere 
else in the world.  This makes it virtually impossible for them to track who 
is sending spam., I can't imagine that logging all smtp traffic on a network 
the size of Rogers would be fun.

Rogers does seem to impose some limits on customers but it's at the expense of 
customers ...  a friend of mine was sending about 1,000 emails using some 
Windows app, Rogers shut him down.   The use was quite legitimate 
(communicating with club members, a club of which he is VP) ... he complained 
and they once again let him relay.

I don't know what the answer is, I just don't think I'd be comfortable with 
any ISP filtering email for me (unless I have 100% control over all the 
techniques used).

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                       Debian GNU/Linux

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml