May I jump in? (Donning asbestos suit. Red, of course, for the season.)
--As off Sunday, December 28, 2003 2:48 AM -0600, Jay Moore is alleged to have said:
On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 09:44:16PM -0800, the entity calling itself Brian Keefer stated:
> What's regretful about this behavior is not that the Internet > gives them the freedom to deliver their scummy payloads - the > regretful thing is that they are either desparate or > unprincipled enough to abuse this freedom.
Yes, so why punish those that abide by the laws (well, thanks to Congress most spammers are now "lawful", but let's just use California and Virginia's laws for the sake of argument)?
Punish??? Your idea of punishment is requiring someone to send his mail through an approved relay?
Given the extreme lengths I've had to keep a couple of (legitimate, small, owner-verified addresses only) mailing lists going when I needed to change ISP's due to a move, I would agree it is a form of punishment. I'll be changing ISP's again as soon as I can, mostly because of this issue. I currently have several small domains that cannot send email due to this issue. And my ISP doesn't even block port 25: I just can't get a static IP address from them. (Note: I did not have a hand in picking my current ISP.)
I don't think you get it; you never will get it until you've been there.
Let's see: I get around 150 spam emails a day. (Not quite your 500, but it more than equals my non-spam email.) I use Spamassassin exclusively: it puts in blacklists as a weight, but only *one* weight of many. If it is the only one that matches the mail gets through to me. I have had two non-spam emails blocked in the three years I've been running this system. I have about 3-4 spam emails get through a week.
I *hate* spam. That my system will automatically filter and sort (oh, and report too) it is a nessitity: I would drown in it otherwise. I admit my system takes some CPU time. I can see why an ISP would look for a cheaper solution, but most people don't see why their email is not getting through, and I've found myself explaining blocklists 5-6 times a year to non-techies. It usually takes about three trys before they understand why their email to grandma didn't even bounce.
Blacklists, used as a sole block, are destructive. They are history based at best: they don't work on content or current info. Quite unlike pf, which always works with current info...
(And I know think we are waaay offtopic for this list.)
Daniel T. Staal
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