On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 11:52:26AM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > Here's some stuff to help awareness. [...]
Thanks. Duly bookmarked and will read after suitable application of coffee. ;-) > I'm glad rich doesn't think there's a problem. I wish I could live in > whatever bubble of reality he's found, because out here with the rest > of us, e-mail is rapidly falling apart, not just because of spam, but > because of the increasingly hysterial (and badly done) reactions to the spam. 1. "Bubble"? Try "31 inches of snow". ;-) 2. I agree with the rest of your comment: (to borrow a bit from what you went on to say) I too have great sympathy for the people trying to stop the spam -- UNLESS they're also the people responsible for the spam. For instance, I have no sympathy at all for Yahoo, since Yahoo Stores allows spammers to operate with impunity from its space: doesn't matter who reports them, how many times, how clear/murky the evidence is, etc.: they do *nothing*. And then they turn around and tout their anti-spam measures to their subscribers. It would solve not only some/much of their problem to take the time/effort/money put into the latter and instead put it into clobbering their own pet spammers. s/Yahoo/XO/ s/Yahoo/Rackspace/ s/Yahoo/Verio/ s/Yahoo/Level 3/ s/Yahoo/C & W/ s/Yahoo/ATT/ and so on, with different variations on the theme, but the same song. Part of this may be due to economic conditions: turning off a paying customer, even a spammer, doesn't go over well when co-lo centers sit mostly empty. But I recognize that spam victims are desperate. My little ISP operation passed the spam event horizon last year: the point at which the volume of spam rejected exceeded the amount of legitimate mail being delivered. It's now running at about 65-70% spam -- and that's with a custom anti-spam config that's been tuned to include whitelisting for all customers so that (I sure hope) I don't block anything they've asked for plus blacklisting of a decent chunk of the most volumnious spammers (e.g. azooogle, hispeedmedia, and so on) and a few other things. Hence the proliferation/popularity of DNSBLs (of which there are now roughly 500), server-side filtering tools (dozens?) and end-user tools (I don't even have an estimate). Some of these are clever and accurate; others hew with a broadsword. NONE of them would exist if ISPs would just Do The Right Thing, because we all have better things to do with our time than spend it tweaking the anti-spam stuff. ---Rsk
