Cnet is reporting that spammers have done the obvious and are making their bots use ISP mailservers. Slashdot pointed to it:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/02/2317243&tid=172&tid=111 They quote Linford of Spamhouse: /***************** This will cause serious problems for the e-mail infrastructure, as it is impractical to block mail with domain names from large ISPs. Linford predicts that ISPs will see a growth in the volume of bulk mail they send and receive over the next two months, with spam levels rising from 75 percent of all e-mail to around 95 percent within a year. "The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail," Linford warned. "You'll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It's the beginning of the e-mail meltdown." **************/ He then goes on to recommend further choking email from clients because ISPs don't have the staff to educate their users. When cox blocked my email, I told them that this would happen. Decentralization is what makes the internet strong. Port blocks don't help anyone but the spammers. Infected or abusive computers should be disconnected until they fix their problems. The user won't be able to tell the difference. Throttled email that gets used up by spammers will look to the user as if they were disconnected by their ISP and the problem of explaining things won't be avoided. The source of the problem needs to be repudiated and that's Microsoft's buggy software. I can only hope that ISP's see their long term interest. The alternative is that no one will have email. Any alternative will be hijacked the same way. M$ delenda est.
