On Thursday, October 23, 1997 03:56, era eriksson [SMTP:era(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi]
wrote:
Of course, you could save a lot of aggravation by rejecting
SMTP connects from these slime domains.
I'm an end-user with a popmail client, not the sysop at my ISP.
Another problem is that lawyers for the spammers would probably
jump all over that. The reason that CIS, AOL, etc, defeated the
spammers' lawsuits is that their filters are set up so that the
ISP's customers have to ask to have their email filtered. Thus
the ISP can say that they aren't imposing filtering; the customer
is. From another legal angle, if the customer initiates filtering,
and suffers financial losses due to lost email, they have a much
smaller chance of successfully suing the ISP than if the ISP
decided to filter email against the customer's wishes.
As filters get better, more spammers will learn to seek out relay
hosts which don't do this sort of logging.
Then those hosts will end up on blacklists as well. The incentive
will come from the fact that a lot of *LEGITIMATE* email from these
machines will end up in /dev/null, and customers will move away
from those ISP's once they realize that their mail isn't being
received because they're on a blacklisted host.
Thanks for the technical tips. Four months ago, I knew nothing
about procmail. Then I started getting flodded with spam. That
gave me the incentive to learn procmail. I'm still a bit rough
around the edges with it.
Walter Dnes
<waltdnes(_at_)interlog(_dot_)com>