> From: ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mike S) > ... > >Instead of paying the extra cost to hire an ISP that cares > >enough to not have spamming customers, people complain about the evils > >of blacklists. > ... > I can't do so because my IP address is on a blacklist. I have > cable modem, but the world thinks I'm a dial-up. For that reason > alone, having nothing whatsoever to do with spam, I'm forced to > give up privacy and control of my communications. Mr. Sauve could rent an IP address that is not on dial-up or dynamic blacklists and run his systems there. A remote co-lo or hosting service would cost more than the $30/month or whatever slum rate he is paying for cable modem service. Or he could convince his correspondents to whitelist his IP address or stop using the relevant blacklists. Either he has not tried that, his correspondents also pay slum rates for slum service, or they don't want enough to hear from him to increase their spam loads. Perhaps I should ask if Mr. Sauve is violating the terms of service of his ISP. What does Charter say about "servers"? Did Charter give Mr. Sauve's IP address to the blacklists that bother him? Or perhaps he has already rented an IP address that is not dynamic. But if he has done that, where is his complaint? Is it just Interveloce/GO International's rates? > "Anti-spam" initiatives that are based on such blacklists are > quite simply the failed results of irrational, fascist thought. In that he is calling his correspondents irrational fascists, because it is they who have chosen to reject his mail. Never mind that facism has something to do with "centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition" and that seems like the opposite of the anarchy of blacklists. Also ignore the fact that a taxi or pizza delivery service refusing to go to dangerous parts of town is no more irrational than refusing mail from the IP address neighborhoods that are major sources of spam. Any individual is unlikely to be a spammer or mugger, but the statistical risk/reward ratio is too high. By all accounts, the odds that the the next SYN to your port 25 from a "dynamic" IP address involve spam are very high. > Regardless of your exact definition of spam, all reasonable ones > I've heard have one thing in common - it's based on CONTENT, not > IP address. Blacklists couldn't care less about content That's nonsense. Blacklists do care about content in a statistical sense. If blacklists don't care about content, then neither do so called Bayseian filters. I've often said that lists like the DUL bug me, but not because they are useless. Lists like the DUL catch a lot of spam and little legitimate mail. > - legitimate > email or spam, out it goes, to the detriment of communications, > which is the Internet's raison d'etre. I take that back, it used > to be that way. Now the Internet is meant to make big corporations > lots of money. I've been around for a few years (TIP-25 (DOCB) in 1972), but I don't recall that Communication in the sense Mr. Sauve means was ever the Internet's raison d'etre. 15 years ago, would be communalists were bemoaning the commercialization of the net and interference with capital-C-Communication, by which they meant they deserved free bandwidth. Their successors complain about the free ride they never got. Back in Mr. Sauve's golden era, his perfect unfiltered IP bandwdith was either not available to small or commercial outfits like Alientech LLC or it would have cost 2000% more (>$5000/year) for 10% as many bits/sec (56K). > Blacklists also, quite clearly, don't work to eliminate spam. No honest person who actually looks at spam agrees with that. Good blacklists (e.g. CRL) are better than 70% effective with false negative rates that large, very conservative corportations can tolerate. Vernon Schryver vjs@xxxxxxxxxxxx