Tony writes:
In a major example of false positives, we already
have examples of one real cost of spam. AOL (as one
example of many) has declared ranges of IP addresses
marked 'residential' as invalid for running a particular
application.
AOL bounces all of my e-mail, but they are unable to explain why they are
doing this. A call to their center for network problems produced no
results; when the person I spoke to did not understand what I meant by MX
records, I knew that I was wasting my time.
I finally modified my sendmail config to bounce everything from AOL. Since
I can't answer anyone in that domain, there's no point in receiving their
e-mail, and perhaps by bouncing it they'll at least know that they won't be
getting a reply.
The interesting thing is, when I examine my mail logs, almost all the mail I
get from aol.com is spam, anyway! So by bouncing all their incoming mail, I
suppose I gain more than I lose.
This would be comparable to the phone companies
dictating that modems couldn't be used from phone
numbers that were allocated for voice use.
Wasn't that once actually the case?
While the IETF can't dictate operational process, it
must defend the open and free use of its core protocol.
I agree. And AOL is a major offender in many ways. There's the real
Internet, and then there's the "AOL Internet"--not unlike the Matrix,
actually.