It's not a big deal commercially, unless you happen to be an ISP or do business with smaller companies and contractors that use their ISP's mail. ISPs are going to be pained by this. Your company might feel cramped if you have to use fax machines for more of your business again.
You make an elegant case for letting people run their own mail servers. One of the differences between you and the "hosed" home user is that you can fix your problem or pay someone else to do it. The home user, with one or fewer broadband providers, gets to take whatever the ISP dishes out. Demanding home users use the ISP's mail server is going to mean no email at all. At that point, the ISP is going to have to chose between losing customers because they get cut off, or losing even more because no one has email that works. Because M$ bugs and greed are the root causes of the problem, all alternates to email can suffer the same way as long as people continue to use Windows. If everyone were to switch to AIM tomorrow, the spammers would take over home user's AIM clients. Someone once told me that a library that offered *nix shell accounts would be a "hacker's paradise". I'm not sure how an always on network full of M$ boxes could be considered anything less than that. What's happened is against the law, but I don't see anyone going to jail. You would think ISPs could see it coming. I hope they don't believe the answer is "trusted computing." M$ delenda est. On Thursday 03 February 2005 11:55 pm, Edmund Cramp wrote: > > I don't see this as a big problem to businesses - we use spamassasin but > an RBL hit only adds 1.0 to the spam score - not matter how many RBLs > fail the message. ...[many fine details of spam filtering]... > > I'd agree that the spam volume is rising - but I don't think that it's a > big deal commercially - it's the home users who are getting hosed by > this, not the corporate users.
