On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Nicholas Staff wrote:
Dean,
I couldn't agree with you more - thanks for saying it.
You're welcome.
whats funny to me is if anything would have given spammers a reason to
exploit open relays it would have been the blacklists.
No, this isn't the case, and ironically, it is anti-spammers that usually
made this assertion. It isn't the case because intelligent spam-blocking
requires that the headers and message content be analyzed, ala spamassasin
and other tools. Years ago, the unreasonable spamops folks insisted on
trying to block spam without receiving it: That is, to send a "550 no spam
accepted" type message before the SMTP DATA command. This kind of blocking
is not reasonable, since use of a relay, any relay (open or closed),
defeats the blocking scheme. The often asserted goal of "saving
resources" is not valid because it is faster to queue the message and
analyze it afterwards than it is to hold up the mail process trying to
decide whether to reject it before receipt.
By contrast, intelligent analysis of the message headers and content can
block the message from a blocked host no matter what relays they used.
(open, closed, authenticated, or unauthenticated). And this is what one
wants.
You should probably read http://www.av8.net/FTC.pdf, which details the
many fallacies promoted by anti-spammers about open relays.
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