someone is using my email address to spam, is there a way to stop this ?

[Marc Lanctot]

Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Aug 2008, Marc Lanctot wrote:
> 
>> Are you claiming that when I hook up to Rogers I will not allowed to 
>> send mail from my machine using a Rogers SMTP server via port 25? If 
>> so..  please,
> 
> Hi Marc.  Rogers will allow you to talk to their MTA (requiring 
> authentication iirc).  They will not allow you to contact an arbitrary 
> MTA out on the 'net on tcp/25.  Until not so long ago you could connect 
> to any MTA and send your mail if you were allowed to relay[1].

Right. I sort of realized that was probably what was meant a few minutes 
after I sent the mail. And that makes complete sense, of course.

Someone brought up net neutrality. It's interesting because I'm against 
traffic-shaping but in this respect it makes complete sense to disallow 
outgoing port 25 to arbitrary MTAs. Is it a hindrance to the client's 
right to a free Internet? Well, yes, technically. Does it cause any 
major problems? Not sure. The only hindrance I can think of is to 
someone experimenting with SMTP using telnet for the first time to see 
how it works. :)

> [1] If you look a bit further back you would have been able to relay 
> through any MTA but that was a different era.

It's funny because I've often considered how to "fix" the problems with 
email. Spamming is one big issue. Email has to be the second-most used 
service on the Internet, yet it's still mostly insecure and can go 
across networks in plain text. How is this possible? I'm kind of 
surprised that the current technology has not been replaced. Is there 
really no secure way to do what we want to achieve that is spam-free?

Does anybody know of a software (preferably that runs as a Thunderbird 
plugin) which assumes spam if it's never heard from that user before, 
sends them a standard response with a CAPTCHA asking the sender to 
respond with the correct letters to be whitelisted? Do these programs 
typically have to be run on the mail server?

Marc

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