Joe <j...@jretrading.com> writes: > To be honest, I wouldn't try to block email from consumers at > source. It would be easy to do, so I think the ISPs must agree with > me. If that were to happen, the spammers won't give up and get proper > jobs, they'll put more effort into compromising networks which are > still permitted to send mail. Since spam from consumers is so much > easier to identify, I think we're better off as we are.
Hm. We might ... unless people would get an IP address assigned for their internet connection and be held liable for the damage they do with it. They do it with cars, phone numbers, social security numbers and other things as well, so why aren't they doing it with IP addresses? >> The contention has pretty much been decided already :( To decide >> whether to send and to receive mail is not up to the users. Only the >> postmasters can do that. >> >> It is not surprising that they are striving hard to keep and to extend >> their powers, or is it? Only at first glance, it's somewhat confusing >> that they admit that 90--95% of all email is SPAM. Instead of taking >> such a statement as evidence to support the assumption that their >> fight is rather futile, one might wonder what actually is on their >> agenda. Are they Borg? >> >> > There is a big advantage in blocking spam at the SMTP level. The body > of the email never gets transmitted. So that 90-95% are spam sending > *attempts*, many of which are denied after only a few packets are > transferred. Allowing them to be sent and then identified and discarded > from peoples' mailboxes would add a great deal of Internet traffic, and > there will never be enough bandwidth... At some point, your internet connection might be flooded with attempts to send SPAM, and the attempts themselves become a problem. You cannot easily somehow block them upstream /before/ they eat up all your bandwidth. Perhaps the concept of concentrating the receiving and sending of email to a relatively small number of mail servers that inevitably have a relatively large number of users and thus attract a great deal of attempts to send SPAM needs to be reconsidered. The irony is that the attempts of ISPs, postmasters and operators of blacklists, like Spamhouse, to make it more difficult for everyone to send and to receive mail are backfiring. If more people would run their own mail servers on their own internet connection, they would take more care not to send SPAM. It would be more difficult for senders of SPAM to get anyone to send their SPAM. There would also be a lot more targets for senders of SPAM, making it way more difficult for them to actually reach anyone. People seem to usually use routers with their "residential" internet connections, and the needed functionality could be built into these devices. It could already have become common practise that everyone who doesn't want to run an MTA on their computer uses their router to send and receive their email instead of entrusting others with it. It's even weird that they are entrusting others with their email, considering the total lack of security (unless they send encrypted mail exclusively, which isn't very feasible). What sense does it make at all to have large mail servers as there are now? I take it it's merely something that developed historically because a few years back, we didn't have the kind of permanent internet connection we do have now, and mail servers that had a permanent connection were actually advantageous. That has changed a lot, and a lot of people won't need to use someone elses mail server anymore. Who is actually /fighting/ SPAM? It seems that everyone is only concerned with /protecting/ their MTA from it by trying to filter it out. -- html messages are obsolete -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87fwmbrp6d....@yun.yagibdah.de