Re: The utilitiy of IP is at stake here

Scott,

Good try, but no cigar.  This would be entirely reasonable if 
open relays were the only way to accomplish what you are after. 
But, if open relays were used this way, the spam flow through 
those open relays are such that "aol/roadrunner/etc" would start 
blocking the IP addresses of those relays.  Back to square one, 
with no gain.
Instead, there are at least two options available for that host 
on a "residential" network (both in heavy use today):
        (i) The host uses a relay supplied by its ISP, one that
        is not blocked by "aol/roadrunner/etc".  This is more or
        less satisfactory depending on what additional
        restrictions the ISP imposes on that relay, but the
        typical restrictions (much as I think they are
        unreasonable) have very little impact on the typical
        residential user who corresponds actively with
        "aol/roadrunner/etc users".
        
        (ii) The host uses a relay with which its owners have
        established some sort of business relationship and which
        relay is in a position to authenticate the host (via SSL
        certificates, SMTP AUTH, or some combination of a tunnel
        and authentication).

I was a big fan of open relays a decade ago, but am no longer 
convinced that they are the required solution to any problem we 
need to solve.
And, no, I don't believe that either of the measures above will 
significantly reduce the volume of spam.  After all, the volume 
of spam is much higher today than it was when open relays were 
the norm, worldwide.  One can reasonably speculate on whether 
the spam volume would be even higher if open relays were more 
readily accessible, but, as many others have pointed out in 
other ways, that really isn't the point.
     john


--On Monday, 26 May, 2003 20:56 -0400 shogunx 
<shogunx(_at_)sleekfreak(_dot_)ath(_dot_)cx> wrote:
> On Tue, 27 May 2003, Tony Hain wrote:
>
> > S Woodside wrote, RE: spam
> > > How about the cost of legitimate emails that get filtered
> > > and never read. Not everyone scans the list to check for
> > > false positives.
> Below is an example for HAVING open relays, as a host on a
> "residential" IP can use an open relay for outgoing, and
> therefore communicate with aol/roadrunner/etc users.  a minor
> mod to the config of the MTA and there you go.
>
> scott
>
>
> > 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. In this case SMTP, but which app is next? There
> > is a 'guilt by association' presumption here by the
> > operations community, which when
> ...