I should add that I don't mean to unduly pick on AOL. Their spam problem
is not any worse or any better than anyone elses. Other ISPs have the same
problem. At most, I would say only that residential ISPs as a category
seem to have a worse problem than do ISPs catering purely to business. And
that residential customers and by extension residential ISPs have a worse
virus-infection problem than do business customers. I think this is not a
coincidence. Anyway, AOL is used just the concrete example. My only
gripe about AOL (as some may know) is that AOL is not against spam, but
only against spam that doesn't pay it advertising fees to communicate to
its users.
--Dean
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Dean Anderson wrote:
On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Alan DeKok wrote:
Dean Anderson <dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com> wrote:
And no, I'm not referring to the fact that forwarded mail can only
authenticate to the last sender. I'm refering to the fact that anyone at
AOL.com can pretend to be anyone else at AOL.com.
That's AOL's problem.
As it has been all this while. AOL still has spammers signing up.
If you can prove you got "bad" email from AOL, it's their
responsibility to track down the cause & fix it.
We already do this now. AOL generally boots abusers. This doesn't happen
instantaneously, however.
How is the scenario you quote any different from a user at AOL
sending bad mail, "from" himself?
It's not any different. That is my point: This will have no effect on
spam: Spam comes from disposable accounts now. It comes from Virus
infected machines now. Abusers simply adapt, and keep on what they were
doing before.
Abusers cost to adapt: practically $0.00.
Our cost: Very expensive.
--Dean