On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 05:00:18PM +0100, Julian Mehnle wrote:
| You are mixing up "advertisement" and "spam" here. No serious company
| wants their products to be "advertised" through spam, as this usually
| would cause way more damage to their corporate image than it were ever
| able to increase their sales. Ask Cyveillance, Inc.[1] if you don't
| believe it.
Most companies certainly do not want their products associated with the
kinds of things spammers have been pushing. They are afraid to do any
spamming because of what is going on. But had it not been the case that
the kind of "low level" junk that is going today were there at all, they
might well consider it safe to "advertise by email", even to unsolicited
(harvested, appended) addresses. I bet many of these company CEOs are
hoping the You-Can-Spam act successfully gets rid of the small time
peddlers so they can proceed to engage in their mainsleaze spamming.
| > It will perhaps make them move their businesses into remote
| > locations - but would it be fair to virtually exclude third-world
| > countries from email simply because domains can be bought cheaply?
|
| Who is talking about blacklisting *top-level* domains? Nobody except you is.
Lots of people have been blacklisting .cn .br .hk .kr .tw 200/8, etc.
I do some of those now. Hopefully SPF will be good enough to let me
remove those.
| > Most of the IPs my provider offers for DSL subscribers are blacklisted.
|
| What blacklists are you talking about?
|
| Many dynamically allocated IP addresses are indeed listed by certain
| blacklists, but this is not being done primarily to prevent spam, but
| to force users to use their ISPs mail relays instead of relaying
| directly. The reason for this is that ISPs need to have their own
| logs so they can confirm complaints about allegedly spamming customers
| of theirs.
I block quite a lot of those myself. I also do this NOT by IP address,
but by domain name. That allows things like changes to IP allocations
to be tracked, and dedicated customers with real mail servers to be opened
up, by changes in reverse DNS data.
| If I were T-Online (a major German ISP), and someone sent me a
| complaint about one of my users having relayed abusive mail directly
| (bypassing my designated mail relay), I could not confirm that
| allegation and thus I could do nothing against my customer. On the
| other hand, my mail server records logs of every message relayed, and
| while it doesn't log the message's text (that wouldn't be lawful in
| Germany anyway), it records meta data like time of relaying, SMTP
| authentication information, envelope sender and recipients, etc.
| against which I can match the complaint.
You could conclude that if there are enough complaints, there must be
something going on. You could sniff the network and see what that
customer is doing. If the German privacy laws prevent those kinds of
things, then you can block outbound port 25 and force customers to
use the mail servers that way, and spare the world much of ths spam,
and spare your abuse desk much of the complaints (and same money).
BTW, logging the text isn't necessary. Spam is not about content;
it's about consent. If the sender believes the content shows that
the consent existed, they can offer it. If the recipient refutes
the claim, they can offer up what they got.
--
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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