Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

On December 28, 2004 at 16:32 laird(_at_)lbreyer(_dot_)com (Laird Breyer) wrote:
> I don't think that ISPs put up with zombies willingly. It's just part
> of the massively decentralized internet.
Apparently they do put up with zombies willingly since there are
somewhere between (by various estimates) 1M and 10M at any given
moment.

Unless you include in "willingly" the unwillingness to spend money
(particularly staff resources) on combatting the problem.

I'd say that sums up most of it, along with a cavalier DGAS (d=don't
g=give...)  attitude, a belief that their revenues lie in expending
focus elsewhere. And general cluelessness which is closely tied to
unwillingness to spend money. And just bad management; whatever the
intent no one in the chain of command has the authority to do whatever
needs to be done, such as shut a zombie down. That's pretty common in
my experience, plenty of staff, a few clueful, quite a few clueful
enough for this, none with the authority to actually do anything that
would shut down or interfere with a customer except billing (non-pay.)

That's another good reason for trying to figure out some sort of
excess charging scheme: It moves it into the realm of billing. We
didn't shut you off because we don't like the e-mail you send etc etc
etc, we shut you off because you've exceeded your credit threshold or
haven't paid your bill or whatever. Ask any corporate lawyer which
s/he'd prefer, shutoffs for content or volume or complaint policies,
or for non-payment (or you can guess.)

> I'd like to speculate that in yet another future, ISPs will be faced
> with new mail transports which bypass metered SMTP. In such a future,
> mail is indistinguishable from binary data, and charged as part of the
> flat monthly fee. 
Yeah well any anti-spam proposal which springs from the assumption
that the entire e-mail infrastructure will be rebuilt from scratch
tends to be shunned. Not sure why the same wouldn't apply to your
comment.

Funny how people who are too clueless to run an anti-virus program are
now suddenly clever enough to deploy open source messaging stealthware
to bypass widespread policy.

Any port in a storm I suppose.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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