On 04/05/04 13:35 -0700, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
<snip>
The point about 'collateral damage' is not that it serves any
strategic purpose, it does not, all it does is to feed the egos
of the people who engage in it. It fails in the spam context
for the same reason that it failled in the military context.
Collateral damage forces parties who are natural allies to treat
you as the enemy.
Collateral damage is a bad choice of terms. DNSBLs are *passive*
systems. Choosing to block mail from any system based on a random
criterion is the choice of the administrator of the blocking system.
Rather than trying to stop the spammer, people using the escalated
blocks are trying to stop the spam supporting ISP from sending them
email. Rather than allowing the ISP to keep the spammers money as well
as that of the legitimate users, the people using escalated listings are
forcing a choice of what customers the ISP wishes to keep.
"We aren't blocking you, we are blocking your spammer supporting ISP" is
a rather frequent refrain among SPEWS users (to take an extreme
example), or among users of blackholes.us (yet another extreme example).
By funding the spammer supporting ISP, those people being termed as
collateral damage are showing an opinion in favour of the ISPs
behaviour. Other administrators choose to disapprove of this and boycott
those email originators until they fix their problems.
There is a utility in certain very narrowly tailored blacklists.
But they should never attempt to list any address for any other
reason than it is a source of spam.
What happens when the ISP in question refuses to remove the spammer(s)
and you keep getting hit by their traffic?
Think of it as a trade embargo, and it makes a lot more sense.
Devdas Bhagat
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