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willhill wrote: You either a) don't understand what I am saying or b) don't want to understand what I'm saying because it conflicts with your beliefs in some way. Whatever. The various other readers of the list will make their own judgements and discuss the technical aspects. If you don't want the body of your email filtered, then start encrypting your mail. Every email you send is filtered -- header and body -- and not just by Cox. Oh, mumbo jumbo! What you describe is a type of expert system and the same fear factor, dare I say hysteria? can be implanted onto any computer that connects to the internet by any protocol. Reasonable defaults can be written into mail server software so that anyone can run one and it does not have to cost any more than the bandwith already paid for.As an example, I don't have to have authentication to prevent others from using my simple mail server as a spam relay. Exim prevented that by default setting and it's set up program carefully walked the user through settings and why they were done. It's not like open heart surgery, there's plenty of time and help to get things right. Cox can take care of their network without shutting down any particular services. If they can't, people will launch massive distributed denial of service attacks from their network with pure garbage. I agree with that kind of monitoring and turn off. Users should be told if their equipment is misbehaving. Sending links is not misbehavior and blocking that kind of message is not economical, it's simple censorship. I like the links and work arounds you have sent but this is ultimately not a technical problem. Cox will be blocking those work arounds soon enough because the spam problem is not the real target, a monitored and censored network is. The real solution to the spam problem is to disconnect compromised machines and make their owners fix things. On Tuesday 29 January 2008 5:15 pm, Scott Harney wrote:Yes. But just like Cox, google employs outgoing spam filters. And it prevents you from doing things like sending to 500 people in a single BCC line from a single message. And it prevents you from sending a certain number of messages per day. And by forcing you to authenticate for each message, it can easily shut down a compromised account. I suspect they also check headers and bodies against a heuristic spam and virii checker as well; if your message "hits" against so many rules, your message is filtered (ala spamassassin) So yes, email providers filter their outgoing mail because they don't want to end up on everyone else's incoming blacklist for forwarding spam and virii. And they don't want to deal with the bandwidth expense either. Or the user complaints. Economically, it is cheaper for them to deploy automated filtering and authentication technologies to prevent spam and virii from entering or leaving their own mail servers than it is to deal with the above issues. These issues are well known and well understood. A good place to start reading about them is by reading up on the Sender Policy Framework (www.openspf.org) and the debate surrounding it and other bolt-on and replacement authentication methods for SMTP. Another good google search would be "open mail relay". Many believe that the only way to truly solve this problem technologically requires replacing SMTP. SPF and similar technologies (yahoo had one I forget the name of) are attempts to augment SMTP to prevent forgery -- something SMTP alone was never designed to do. So if you don't trust Cox or Google or anyone else to handle your mail, you will have to spend real $ building and managing a mail server. And you really will have to control the mail being sent out by your server or no one will accept incoming mail from it. _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net_______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://mail.brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net |
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