ietf-asrg
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Re: [Asrg] filtering at connect time

2003-03-05 08:03:56
Brad Templeton wrote:
On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 09:00:00AM +0700, Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote:

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003 13:17:14 -0700 (MST), Vernon Schryver wrote:

That is not right.  People who operate relays may be less culpable than
the original senders of spam, but they are certainly blame worthy
and they are certainly not victims in the same class as spam targets.

The term of art is 'contributory negligence'

That is the term, but only a very few years ago open relays were
the norm, even the polite thing to do.

There are many things that once were okay, or at worst ignored, and are now as much as outright illegal.

You used to be able to get a full Usenet feed at 300 baud.

Society moves.  The Internet moves faster than most things.

Anyway, the point is the open relay operators are not doing things
deliberately.  They don't want to relay spam.  They are spammer's
victims.  If possible, we should try to help them.

Agreed.

I firmly believe that blacklisting open relays being used to spam is one of the simplest and most effective ways to help them notice they have a problem. Trying to contact relay owners is usually a waste of time due to poor WHOIS practises. Demonstrating that running an open relay has real consequences is what gets them to pay attention and fix their problems.

Blacklisting relays generates the occasional false positive here - but our infrastructure takes special steps to ensure that any rejection is seen, with instructions on what to do to rectify the situation.

In that sense, our system has no false positives - there's always a means to get the email through. Just may take you two tries.

Forcing them
all to close is something to be done only if we have exhausted all
ways to solve the problem.

That's silly. The problem _is_ that they're open and usually being used to spam, and the quickest and most appropriate way to solve the problem (in 99.99% of the cases) is to close them. Ignoring a spam hydrant does nobody any good.

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