On Sun, 13 Apr 2003, John Fenley wrote:
Personaly I think it is the recipients responsability to block their own
spam. It upsets me when I hear about legitimate mail being blocked. any
"good faith" system using todays weak reasoning will dump some legitimate
mail. Ulimately it is the recipients decision about what they want to
recieve. I feel that any system to block mail, that is not agreed to by the
recipients, should be illegal. There are substantial penalties for
interfering with postal mail. Email should be as protected as postal mail is
from third party interference.
I disagree most vehemently. The user chooses their ISP, and its success at
blocking spam will soon be the primary differentor between good and bad
ISPs, if the crowd screaming "censorship" doesn't have its way. What you
are really proposing is that the recipient can block spam, but he can't
ask for help from his own ISP or mail provider. That puts far to great a
burden on the recipient, who rarely has the knowledge or resources to do a
good job.
Without the threat of blacklisting by receiving ISPs, there is no
incentive for sending ISPs to control spam eminating from their systems.
Without any control on sending, the volume will increase dramatically,
making the mismatch between spammers and recipients even greater. The
recipients will be overwhelmed. Note that without blacklists, the
proportion of spam coming from sending hosts that also provide legitimate
mail will increase. With all hosts sending legitimate and spam mail,
connection address will lose its value as a spam indicator.
And before you say the ISP is a monopolist, even if that is true in some
rural area, that would not prevent the user from using a different
provider for mail if the ISPs spam policies did not suit the user.
Further, blacklisting by recipients is greatly inferior to blacklisting by
MTA operators, because only MTA level mail rejection provides notice to
legitimate senders that mail has been blocked.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg