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RE: [Asrg] An amazing amount of spam

2003-03-19 14:35:06
As I noted in another letter (there are far too many and I better get to
doing other stuff) Spam can indeed be a DoS. If you're getting too much
traffic for your pipe size you will have to deal with that and it may be
that you drop random messages. You can also limit messages from a source
IP address. But these are patches not solutions.

The network problem is real and should be dealt with as such. I just
worry about trying to finding technical solutions at the app level. App
level solutions controlled by the end points might change behavior and
solve the problem but we mustn't tie them closely together.

Having seen how much the net has grown and expecting that we will indeed
have everyone originating multiple VHDTV streams, I think the spam
volume isn't going to be the driving issue. Remember that telecom is
still in stasis in the first mile and in capabilities relative to the PC
and the Internet backbone. Routing multigigabit streams is the more
long-term issue than a few hundred megabytes of spam per minute.

I realize I sound too causal about this but have seen too much effort
placed in focusing on subproblems at the cost of failing to solve the
larger problems. NATs being a classic example of that kind of tragedy. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Kee Hinckley [mailto:nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 15:55
To: asrg(_at_)bobf(_dot_)frankston(_dot_)com
Cc: 'Alan DeKok'; asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: [Asrg] An amazing amount of spam

At 2:33 PM -0500 3/19/03, <asrg(_at_)bobf(_dot_)frankston(_dot_)com> wrote:
My filter ain't that great -- just adequate. Sure, you can attack with
me a DOS or a DDOS but that's not spam, that's simply a tantrum or
worse.

I think you missed the part where the ISPs (and some domain users) 
have come to realize that there *is* no detectable difference between 
a flood of spam and a DoS.

In fact, that's literally true of my mail server.  I had to turn of 
the DoS protections in my new router because it kept disabling port 
25 every time my mail server overloaded.

Not to say that we shouldn't be discussing user-only features (even 
content filters).  But we shouldn't blow off the network problem. 
And we *definitely* should not deploy end-user solutions that 
aggravate the network problem.  Auto-generated email addresses fall 
into that category.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to
accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to
regulate
everyone else's.

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