On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 23:30, Doug B wrote: > On Thursday 24 April 2003 11:03 pm, Res wrote: > > > > BS, I have no hesitation in taking out entire domains, and do! aol > > for instance, yahoo for another example. > > > I do not speak for RedHat, however I'm sure I speak on behalf of many > > postmasters. > > > > As a subscriber to a Linux list, I expect you like open source software > and the freedom it gives you. You like to take responsibilty for your > own actions. Then why do you censor other peoples email? That's what > blocking amounts to. Do you post those blocked addresses so people > will know what you're doing or is this closed source... done without > their knowledge? Any postmaster who blocks email should say up front: > > WE CENSOR YOUR EMAIL > > and list those domains that are blocked so their users can decide if > that is what they want. I personally don't want anyone deciding what > makes it to my mailbox! I'll take that responsibilty thank you very > much. > > I don't have an answer to spam, but punishing the inocent to control the > guilty is certainly not the way to do it. It is not censorship, so no "moral high ground" was achieved here. Spam is an abuse of private property. If there is no cost to spamming, there will be no limitation of it. Refusing connections from a port/IP/IP Range is a technical matter, not censorship. Censorship requires that a specific content be objected to and only matter with that content be removed. The blocking of domains that have a tendency to be source of a high percentage of spam is not censorship, since no content filtering is performed. Now, it is also an economic decision, If you have a network provider that does this, and makes it known, that provider will either see an increase in demand due to people wanting this and accepting the risk of some lost email, or a decrease as people decide the occasional missed email is not worth spending the time to hit delete a few hundred times a day, after downloading the megabytes of data they just deleted, and go elsewhere. This applies to the spam-source provider as well. If a provider refuses to do anything about spam, and there becomes a penalty for doing that, that provider will begin to lose customers if people do not like the result. Of course, spammers are likely to gravitate there, so the cost may be acceptable to the ISP, as they trade non-spammer for spammers. This is perfectly acceptable as well. It is not about what makes it to *your* mail box, it is about what resources are used on *my* mail servers, and the bandwidth usage of *my* network. OK, now back to topicality. Bill -- Bill Anderson RHCE #807302597505773 bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
