At 3:51 PM -0400 6/17/98, Richard Welty wrote:
the RBL is entirely an IP address thing. no domain names are harmed in the operation of the RBL.
Sigh. There used to be a list of spammers' domain names, such as cyberpromo.com. There were some companies (PGP) that were considering mail reader products which would do filtering on domain names. But after the new copyright law was passed, they dropped their plans for this scheme. Apparently, since cyberpromo and spam sending has gone underground, people have forgotten some of this. I predicted last year, when Cyberpromo was disconnected that "undergound" would happen, and that it would be harder to track than when they were directly connected, and that it wouldn't make a difference in the amount of spam. All have been proven. Sigh. Sigh. Those who were pressuring AGIS, should send AGIS some money for their lost revenue. --Dean P.S. In private discussion, Chris Liljenstolpe brought up a very good point about 3rd party relaying, and its causes. It seems that some Web Serving ISP's won't cancel web accounts according to their AUP if the spam wasn't sent from those accounts. So spammers are trying to hide their sending accounts using 3rd party relays. This is total hypocrisy. If you have an anti-spam policy, then you should enforce it on your customers regardless of where they send the spam from. [What its hard to tell, and it could be abused to deny services? Well, the anti-spam RBL/Cancel etc. ideas are pretty much full of such holes. I guess what you should be doing is more investigation of abuses to make sure it can't be abused. Too expensive? I thought spam was so ungodly expensive. Just think of the savings. :-P] So I amend my statement that RBL causes 3rd party relaying to be that the RBL and hypocritical ISP's cause 3rd party relaying. So if you aren't going to do the follow though, then you should just forget about the anti-spam AUP, too. Advertising happens. You can't make it illegal. Maybe you could help spammers avoid totally stupid things like sending out 300K attachments which just say "look at my web site", but more extreme action is certainly destined to fail. And screw things up for the rest of us. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP/DCE http://www.av8.com We Make IT Fly! (617)242-3091 x246 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++