On Monday, January 12, 2004, at 12:49 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote:
Several times? As far as I know, most people I know have never been
collateral or other kinds of blacklist damage. Do you use what might
be called marginal ISPs? Some large outfits such as UUNet have long
refused to care enough about spam.
The ISP in question was XO -- marginal by some standards, perhaps. But
as I tried to mediate the dispute, I found XO acting much more
responsibly than Road Runner, which was blocking them.
I also have to say that I fear your approach would help the larger ISPs
use spam as an excuse to kill off smaller ISP's... and I question the
fundamental legitimacy of blocking all of an ISP's customers before
there's a fair due process to establish the ISP's culpability. "Caring
enough about spam" is an awfully slippery concept on which to base a
blacklist.
If you can trust
outsiders to have "sufficient administrative staff to deal with the
inevitable mistakes and exceptions" in a spam blocking mechanism
that is not blacklist, then why can't a blacklist be run properly?
Good point. That's why I favor giving users access to their spam pool
when they suspect problems, and using challenge/response in certain
(carefully defined) situations. A good filtering mechanism is not
nearly as black and white as a blacklist.
Any fool
can set up a blacklist. That many fools have and other fools have
used them does not show that blacklists are bad any more than the ease
of setting up an IP network shows TCP is the spawn of the devil.
I will confess that my personal experience makes it very hard for me to
be rational on the subject of blacklists, as I fear that any concession
to them will only encourage the creation of destructive blacklists by
"fools". In general I prefer a solution that any fool can implement,
because one surely will. -- Nathaniel