At 07:23 PM 4/1/02 -0500, Krishna Tateneni wrote: > What's an open relay? Or should I be googlin' instead of askin'?
Mike gave a good answer. I'll expand upon from another angle. There are some people who philosophically want to run SMTP servers with open relays. They are looking back to why the open relay once was a Good Thing and want to continue providing such a resource to the world. One of the nice things with an open relay was that it could be used an anonymity helper by helping to hide one's email's origins, especially if the SMTP server didn't give much info in the headers. (Not as useful as some of the anonymous remailers, another endangered email species these days for similar reasons as the open relays.) Another usefulness of the open relays was the ability to email even if one's Internet connection doesn't include SMTP services. The sad thing that can happen to Good Things is people using them for Bad Purposes. Like the "tragedy of the commons", the resource is ruined. Spammers were the main people to ruin the goodness of open relays. A smaller group to tarnish the open relays were email forgers doing things other than spam. The result was that people running open relay SMTP servers were seen as enablers for worldwide nuisance. Among such people is John Gilmore, an old-timer of the Internet and cypherpunks. His server at toad.com has been an open relay. The site was added to various blacklists as a spam enabler. Gilmore doesn't approve of spam but that doesn't cut as many people see the mere provision of an open relay as reckless disregard for the Internet's well being. One of the other bad ways that open relays can be used is for mail transport of worms. See http://www.politechbot.com/p-03228.html J.D. Abolins
