If those filters and port blocks did anything to block spam, I'd believe you. I can tell you that AOL and Hotmails spam filters are largely ineffective because my wife uses one and my mom used to use the other until it became unbearable. You and I both know that the vast majority of spam now comes from botnets of home PCs on broadband connections and we also know that spam outnumbers legitmate email even after filters.
The real answer to the botnet problem is OS diversification. At least one in four computers is part of a botnet. If ISPs really cared, they would not still be promoting the monoculture. Net neutrality is ultimately an issue of political control. The ability to filter the internet is the ability to filter opinion and it will be used that way. That's not the way the internet is supposed to work and technically the filters are bottlenecks that throttle performance. The example blocking is more than Hotmail and AOL. It's all of the domains controlled by Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo and it reeks of government induced collusion. If you want to know what a corporate controlled, government censored internet will look like, turn on your TV. A free internet is cutting into that censorship and control and that's the reason the FCC came out against network neutrality. TruthOut recommends dumping "free" email, but that won't get solve their problem. If AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo all decide to filter TruthOut, they will do it at all levels and it will work here just as well as it does in China. On Thursday 20 September 2007 8:14 am, Tim Fournet wrote: > Also, SMTP servers blocking incoming mail from misconfigured servers, > and ISPs blocking incoming TCP/25 connections to home IP ranges have > nothing to do with each other, except for being two separate measures of > blocking SPAM.
