From: Bill Sommerfeld
<sommerfeld(_at_)orchard(_dot_)arlington(_dot_)ma(_dot_)us>
...
One problem with dropping suspected spam into a spam cesspool as
opposed to rejecting it outright in the SMTP session is that many
people (myself included) have neither the time nor the inclination to
wade through our spam cesspools on a regular basis looking for
misclassified messages.
That's too true. Since the spam collected/rejected by my real mailbox
and personal spam traps exceeded 1000 spam/day, I can only skim envelopes.
If I count duplicates, my average for the last 40 days is 3516/day.
An SMTP-level reject at least gives the sender a real-time indication
that the recipient will not be seeing the message any time soon..
There may be a false dichotomy there. You can reject a message during
the SMTP transaction and so give the sender a real-time indication while
also capturing the entire message in a spam cesspool. All 787 MBytes
now in my 40-day rolling cesspoll were rejected with a 5yz or 4yz SMTP
response. That many systems don't capture what they reject implies
nothing about anything except those SMTP servers.
I'm flummoxed by criticism of external DNS blacklists based on the
lack logging by SMTP servers. That's predictable among the general
public, but not here.
This thread is related to the nearby thread about the end of life
announcement for SpeakFreely. The problem in both cases is less with
evil media conglomerates converting the Internet into TV than with people
who won't feed themselves. Instead of getting their code and networks
running IPv6, they install NAT boxes and complain about the RIAA.
Contrary to the whines from ISPs with major spam problem, those that
have real (including enforced) anti-spam policies don't have spamming
customers. Instead of paying the extra cost to hire an ISP that cares
enough to not have spamming customers, people complain about the evils
of blacklists. Instead of taking the extra trouble to use an operating
system or at least an MTA that is not a worm delivery and spam
facilitation system, they send mail to random, spam-obsessed strangers
like me asking how to add spam filtering to Outlook.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com