At 11:30 AM 2002-05-18 -0400, John R Levine wrote:
> > My experience has not been in large ISP's,
> > but those small ones who get "creative" in their filters.
>
>Yes, indeed. That's because their servers are melting down from the
>torrents of spam and they're desperate. I know several of them, this is
>what they tell me.
>
>While we have to argue about filters in the short run, the only thing
>that's going to make a difference in the long run is to stop the spam.
>Technical means have clearly failed, maybe laws will work. See
>http://www.cauce.org.
I guess I do not think that technical means have failed. What has happened
is that the stomach of ISPs to enforce spam blocks has failed.
Spam blocks are not to stop spam - I agree that those are doomed to
failure. Spam blocks are to shun spammers, to cause their legitimate
customers to abandon them, and to force compliance.
The country of China is screaming about spam blocks, and they are starting
to talk anti-spam legislation, because enough ISPs are blocking China, as a
country, to make a difference. Australia did pretty much nothing regarding
spam until they were added at the "Telstra" level, then they started
chasing their spammers around.
Just as an example, we have two major freemail services in the US (and a
lot of smaller ones). Hotmail and Yahoo. Hotmail has a strict "no
commercial use" policy and will close a hotmail box that is used as a spam
dropbox or as a 419 target. Yahoo (USA) seems to ignore all complaints -
almost all the 419 spam I get is from Yahoo because they do not close
response boxes. I have exchanged e-mail with a 419 operator at yahoo,
stringing them along with every response containing full e-mail headers and
blind copied to yahoo abuse, and it went on for weeks before I gave
up. The operator's drop box was working fine. Every e-mail was sent
through the yahoo webmail system.
Were a number of ISPs to start banning all yahoo mail origins, they would
probably get the message. But they won't do a *thing* until then, why
should they?
And the reality is that as strongly as I feel about this, I have not
blocked yahoo mail to anything other than my personal boxes.
When RBL had to go subscription to support themselves, we lost a voice of
unity. They are still effective (see figures at end*), but not as
effective as when 40% of the Internet (by some estimates) used them to
block the spammers.
But, of course, with 40% of the Internet freeloading, they could not
support the bandwidth. (I'm still freeloading, I'm a hobbiest).
Probably 60%-70% of the spam reports submitted are submitted through
spamcop, and they are probably going to collapse under the weight as well.
No, I do not think that technology has failed. I think that the stomach of
the ISPs to do the right blocking has failed. The type of filtering that
we are talking about, truing to guess what a spam is by content, is
inherently broken. Admitting, "Look we are going to take breakage, but we,
as a company, or an ISP, or whatever, will not take e-mail from a network
that does not enforce an effective spam policy because we simply can't
afford it, you are costing us more than we will make on orders" and making
that clear in their bounce messages, well, that is, I'm afraid that is what
it will take.
*This is my count of blocks for the week:
orbs.dorkslayers.com, 927
spews.relays.osirusoft.com, 3082
relays.ordb.org, 3524
rbl-plus.mail-abuse.org; 16832
bl.spamcop.net, 1944
blocklist2.squawk.com, 5946
blocklist.squawk.com, 16
consulted in this order. blocklist2, by the way, is Korea. I get no legit
mail from Korea.
My belief is that most of the hits from rbl+ are from the dial-up part.
maps_rbl_domains =
blocklist.squawk.com,
blocklist2.squawk.com,
rbl-plus.mail-abuse.org,
spews.relays.osirusoft.com,
orbs.dorkslayers.com,
relays.dorkslayers.com,
relays.ordb.org,
bl.spamcop.net
--
War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is
worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to
fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a
miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made so by the
exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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