Re: some more principles of anti-spam (Re: Re: anti-spam collateral damage)

Richard Johnson wrote:

> Stopping spam is not about punishment.  It's about not accepting traffic
> from those networks which emit spam, until such time as they stop emitting
> spam.  The blocking happens because the majority of all mail delivery
> attempts are for spam (now at 99.999+% on one of my networks), and not for
> legitimate mail.
> 
> With blocking of pro-spam networks in place, we lose less of the legitimate
> one-to-one email from the not-spam networks in that horrendous
> denial-of-service flood.  That way, we can preserve even our very essential
> anonymous email.

ya, right.

<[email protected]>: host mail.river.com[206.168.117.188] said: 554
     <dsl093-191-107.nyc2.dsl.speakeasy.net[66.93.191.107]>: Client host
     rejected: blocked dom spam inject. See 
<http://www.river.com/ops/nospam/>
     (in reply to RCPT TO command)

see: http://www.speakeasy.net/tos/

<mr grumpy rants>
check the terms of service which leads me to the question, why are you 
blocking my mail server which has a legitimate right to be on the net 
and communicate with any other mail server?  Additional questions are 
who decided to block my IP address, on what grounds, what is the appeals 
process, and if that fails who do I sue?  I'm really tired of vigilantes 
making entire address ranges just because they don't like someone or 
some policy.
</mr grumpy rants>

I am not accusing you of being the vigilante, but the blacklist you use 
certainly quacks like a vigilante duck.

> Wrenching this back on topic from that point:  hashcash offers us a means,
> at least in the middle term, for accepting messages from otherwise pro-spam
> networks whose emissions would normally be blocked and reported as bulk to
> the DCC.  That's the sole reason I remain interested in hashcash systems.

then I ask you to work with me on the next phase of camram differential 
pricing.  in the environment, you could use blacklist information as the 
seed data to specified prices for connections to your mail server. 
eventually pricing would correct for egregious blacklisting and you 
would end up with a much cleaner price sheet that others could use.  It 
would also give much finer grain information about the amount of scam 
coming through an address.  And most importantly, when I tried to e-mail 
you, I would have been told

<[email protected]>: host mail.river.com[206.168.117.188] said: 554
     <dsl093-191-107.nyc2.dsl.speakeasy.net[66.93.191.107]>: Client host
     rejected: insufficient postage. See <http://www.river.com/ops/more 
bits/>
     (in reply to DATA command)

and I would have been able to generate a bigger stamp to get through and 
find out WTF is going on.

grumpily yours (because I've been blackholed yet again.)

---eric

-- 
Question: What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
Answer: George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.