Hi, On Tue, 7 May 2002, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 06:55:29PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote: > > On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 10:21:30AM +0200, Emile van Bergen wrote: > > > > > Making the ISP accountible for the mail sent by their customers by > > > having it forced through their MTA in this way is a senseless way of > > > approaching the problem, IMHO. > > > > making ISPs responsible for the mail sent by their customers is the ONLY > > thing that actually works.
Don't skip the part that says "by having it forced through the ISP's MTA". I agree with the point of holding ISPs responsible for spammers on their network, just not with the 'solution' of forcing all mail to go through their MTA, at least when static IPs are concerned. They can be blocked on an IP-by-IP basis, and the ISP can easily disconnect the customer to which the IP belongs. > Yes, and the only times we've been blacklisted was when our customers > turned out to be running open relays on their shiny new NT boxes. > > Many cable modem systems provide static addresses. This gets really > sticky, because lately we've been getting a lot of spam from them. The > local abuse/postmaster@isp merely disclaims responsibility and forwards > complaints to the operator. Just local here in Portland Maine there > are some 3000 businesses on cable; as more and more of them start > running their own SMTP servers and plugging in CDROM email databases > this problem will mushroom. The damage a spammer can do from dialup > is nothing compared to what he can do on a 2M cable connection with > a linux box and powerful MTA. > > The only entity that can do anything is the ISP. They have to be > responsible for the mail their customers send. That's all fine, but then the solution is to hold the ISP responsible if he leaves a known spammer connected, *not* to force their customers to use their MTA. Both the connectivity and the MTA service are subject to some acceptable use policy. The ISP does not need the MTA as an extra gatekeeper for blocking spammers - he can just disconnect them, if he's good willing. If he isn't, the rest of the world does not need to be able to block an ISPs MTA to be able to pressure the ISP to disconnect spammers; they can just block his customer netblocks instead. That's a much cleaner solution than to force sites (that have a static IP) to use some ISPs MTA, because you don't have to decide at which size or connectedness you draw the line. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
