ximian evolution

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   From: miah <jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com>
   Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 10:26:57 -0700

   Seriously, I really wonder who is responsible for the spam
   protection at AOL.  It seems they haven't done any real research or
   reading about the spam problem.  Because people I know that have
   AOL still get loads and loads of spam.

The problem here is that we don't know how bad the problem would be if
the large ISP's did allow dynamic addresses to send directly to them.

   On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:00:19PM -0400, Derek Martin wrote:
   > 
   > Anyone who thought it would is deluding themselves.  For a substantial
   > period of time, before settling on my current spam solution, I
   > monitored where every piece of spam I received came from, in part to
   > get the hosts listed on an RBL (which I no longer think is an
   > acceptable course of action), and in part to understand where the spam
   > I was receiving was coming from.
   > 
   > Only a small percentage of it was from a residential broadband IP in
   > North America.

Perhaps that's because the residential broadband service providers
don't accept mail from dynamic addresses (and many providers block
outbound port 25, also)?  From what I've seen, quite a bit does come
from what appear to be dynamic IP addresses; I suppose YMMV.

   > The point is, spamming is profitable.  So long as there are a
   > multitude of options for those who want to spam people, measures
   > like this one, while well-intentioned, will only serve to
   > irritate some segment of the legitimate user community who are
   > not content to use the Internet as they would a TV, but will do
   > very little to prevent spam.  Real spammers will not be hindered
   > by such measures, and will simply use one of the other many
   > alternative means of delivering their spam to you.

This particular measure has no impact whatsoever on the vast majority
of the user community (which just uses the settings provided them by
their ISP), and minimal impact on others (who want to configure their
own MTA but don't know how to set up their ISP's server as the relay
host), and significant impact only on people who for one reason or
another specifically want to run their own MTA.

(In my own experience when I've done system administration, I've
always found it a lot easier to use a central smart relay anyway.)