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Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

2004-12-28 20:05:14
I'm not sure I understand something completely...

In order for a paid postage system to work, ISPs would need to block/control all mail transactions on their network. The logical way to do this is to block port 25 and monitor and rate limit transactions through the authorized servers.

But it seems to me that just blocking port 25 and monitoring and rate limiting transactions through the authorized servers solves at least 90% of the problem without charging anyone anything. If the outgoing mail servers all had anti-virus scanning too, you'd make it very difficult to spread viruses effectively too. Adding smtp-auth on top would make it more difficult still. And instead of fining those that are spewing viruses, you could just count each failed virus sent as an email attempt and cut off their email at something like 500 messages as going over their quota. That gives the users an incentive to clean up, while still allowing the ISP a content-neutral mechanism for cutting off the bad apples.

So why aren't the advocates of email postage at least recommending this as a first step?

(Just to be clear, I would only advocate mandatory port 25 blocking on consumer-level accounts.)

--
James Lick -- 黎建溥 -- jlick(_at_)jameslick(_dot_)com -- http://jameslick.com/

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