Tony writes: > In a major example of false positives, we already > have examples of one real cost of spam. AOL (as one > example of many) has declared ranges of IP addresses > marked 'residential' as invalid for running a particular > application. AOL bounces all of my e-mail, but they are unable to explain why they are doing this. A call to their center for network problems produced no results; when the person I spoke to did not understand what I meant by MX records, I knew that I was wasting my time. I finally modified my sendmail config to bounce everything from AOL. Since I can't answer anyone in that domain, there's no point in receiving their e-mail, and perhaps by bouncing it they'll at least know that they won't be getting a reply. The interesting thing is, when I examine my mail logs, almost all the mail I get from aol.com is spam, anyway! So by bouncing all their incoming mail, I suppose I gain more than I lose. > This would be comparable to the phone companies > dictating that modems couldn't be used from phone > numbers that were allocated for voice use. Wasn't that once actually the case? > While the IETF can't dictate operational process, it > must defend the open and free use of its core protocol. I agree. And AOL is a major offender in many ways. There's the real Internet, and then there's the "AOL Internet"--not unlike the Matrix, actually.