Re: anti-spam collateral damage

In article <[email protected]>,
 "Eric S. Johansson" <[email protected]> wrote:

> http://www.eff.org/wp/?f=SpamCollateralDamage.html
> 
> this is something I've been arguing about with people for a long time. 
> Personally, I think that hybrid sender-pays is a nondiscriminatory 
> solution that would meet the requirements of the eff
> 
> ---eric


This is a digression, but you're referencing a shaky source for 
motivation there.  The EFF is not a legitimate authority on such 
issues, and their requirements aren't something that needs to be met 
for a system to be viable or proper.

Distrust the EFF on that one in particular.  Its abstract says:

"... Although people on the MoveOn.org email lists have specifically 
 requested to receive these alerts, many large ISPs regularly block 
 them because they assume bulk email is spam. ..."

That's disingenuous at best on the part of the EFF.  In actual fact, 
not all the people on MoveOn.org's lists had specifically requested to 
receive the alerts.  Yet MoveOn.org was sending to such victims anyway.

MoveOn.org was likely either accepting forged subscriptions (by failing 
to confirm anonymous subscription requests), or was allowing "friends" 
to sign up unwilling victims.  As a result, MoveOn.org was sending 
unsolicited bulk email to those unwilling victims.  It thus shouldn't 
be at all surprising that they were blocked as the spammers they 
actually ended up being.

In general, while Cindy Cohn is generally a very smart lawyer, she 
seems to have an institutional inability to understand that speech is 
not free when it comes postage due.  Our mail servers are our private 
property, not some kind of commons.  When we say "no unsolicited bulk 
email is allowed on our property," we mean it.  We can't afford to 
allow it, as it exponentially increases our costs.  In addition, it's 
severely distasteful to our users for them to be slammed into lists 
against their will, and they tend to stop paying us unless we protect 
them from such abuse.  Luckily, we can enforce our ban on unsolicited 
bulk email by blocking organizations that send it.

It is not in the least improper for us to wholly block the sender of an 
improperly maintained mailing list (commercial or not) off our private 
property.  Stopping such spammer misbehavior is the very essence of 
what we're aiming for.  When the spammers stop slamming our users into 
lists against their will; when they stop sending unsolicited bulk 
email, we can stop blocking the networks and domains they use to inject 
their spew.

The EFF is just plain wrong on this particular issue.  Our servers are 
not their commons.  There is and can be no legitimate requirement that 
we expend the exponentially greater resources necessary to carry and 
deliver unsolicited bulk email, even for non-commercial godspammers, or 
donation-seeking polspammers like MoveOn.org.

Thus the EFF is not a useful or rational source of hashcash 
requirements.  Concentrate on doing things properly, instead of being 
coopted into the EFF's attempts to create a commons out of our private 
mail servers.


Richard

Disclaimer:  I donated money via MoveOn.org.  MoveOn.org did not spam 
me, personally.  I have similarly donated money and equipment to the 
EFF, for their good work on crypto and copyright issues.

-- 
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