On Tue, 27 May 2003, John C Klensin wrote:
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".
right, except my "residential" ISP bans the use of any and all servers on
its network. their routers are configured to drop all http requests to my
machine on the floor, by default. so what do i do? in true MANET style i
moved the web server to port 81. my traffic went down significantly for
almost a month until i was able to get the word out that apache was
running on 81. this is probably in violation of RFC, but, well, the data
must get through.
(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).
well i can just as easily ask one of the folks i have done consulting for
to relay for me (or just configure it that way), then tweak my local exim
config, and thats that. but that dosen't solve the problem on a large
scale, just locally.
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.
i had one until about a year ago, when i was watching the packet sniffer
and saw spam being pushed through. then i closed the relay.
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.
personally, i get no spam. i just don't. i have no filters. i somply
get none. don't ask me why.
scott
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
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