spam control again

[m_blu at mittelstadt.net (Michael Mittelstadt)]

[Quoth josephc at etards.net]
] On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Derek Martin wrote:
] 
] > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
] > Hash: SHA1
] > 
] > On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 10:41:33AM -0400, josephc at etards.net wrote:
] > > I understand people are upset over SPAM, and the majority of SPAM
] > > prevention should not be done on the last mile. But people need to
] > > complain to their ISP, not their congressman.
] > 
] > As has already been touched upon several times by several different
] > people, your ISP can't solve the problem.  They are incapable.  Not
] > possible.  They would have to make a judgement call about what is and
] > what is not spam, and they can not possibly make that decision
] > acceptably for all users.  No matter what they do, large quantities of
] > their users will complain.  So the right thing for them to do,
] > unfortunately, is to leave spam control up to the user.
] > 
] 
] Being the sysadmin for an ISP, albeit small, I respectfully disagree. We 
] have several thousand users and within the last 12 months took a very 
] active approach to reducing the amount of SPAM that makes it into our 
] users mail box. After the initial rollout, the upkeep has been minimal and 
] issues such as false positives have been practically non-existant. We also 
] enacted strict guidleines for our customers to make sure they did not 
] originate SPAM themselves, intentionally or otherwise.

I'm a sysadmin for a somewhat larger ISP (several hundred thousand
users) that offers spam filtering as an option.  And, I think that the
middle ground is the way to go.  The ISP can and should offer
filtering as an option (a very significant portion of the userbase
chooses this path).  Many users do not have the patience or the will
to set up their own spam filtering, and are willing to place their
trust in their ISP, which, depending on it's implementation, can be
fairly successful.