phil wrote:
Perhaps I should have used a better word, such as "selective", to
imply methods that are much more likely to stop spam than
non-spam. The MAPS DUL does not discriminate between spam or non-spam,
or even between users who have generated spam in the past and those
that do not. If you're a dialup user, you are automatically guilty of
spamming even if you can prove yourself innocent.
you had me until the final sentence. the maps dul is a list of dialups,
not a list of guilty spammers. anyone who subscribes to it knows what they
are getting. (i no longer speak for maps, but i know what the dul is.)
Here's another way that the MAPS DUL is not meaningful. Comcast, which
just put all their cable modem IP address blocks in the MAPS DUL, says
that if you upgrade to one of their expensive commercial services you
can get a block of static IP addresses instead of one dynamic
address. And those static addresses will not be placed on the MAPS DUL.
if comcast would ask maps to list things on the dul which were not dialups,
then there could be a problem. but since the dul is just a list of dialups,
it seems very meaningful that comcast asks maps to put their dialups on it.
So if all you have to do to evade a supposed anti-spam mechanism is to
pay some more money to your ISP, do you still consider that mechanism
to be "meaningful"? Or is it just a way for your ISP to cynically
profit from spam with a mechanism they claim to be anti-spam?
a long time ago i warned that the real victim of spam would be "openness"
and that when closed communities with gates started appearing, then we would
all know that we had lost the battle. what i failed to predict was how long
the "losing" would last before "lost" was generally considered obvious.
it seems that comcast has determined that it costs them a lot more support
expense for a customer who can initiate SMTP than for a customer who can't.
they may also have discovered that such customers are willing to pay more.
and they have certainly discovered that maps's dul is a voluntary method
by which they can reduce or limit their support expenses on customers who
are not paying extra for the "initiate SMTP" service.
if you don't believe that comcast ought to have the ability to control how
its services are used, then your recourse is the local PUC, and the FCC.
paul