on Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 12:49:54PM -0400, alex@yuriev.com wrote:
This is just the cold blooded economic reality. The same reality which dictates that only smaller companies can enfore strict anti-spam policies, and prevent their customers from behaving badly.
You want cold-blooded economic reality? I'm nominally a consultant, programmer, writer, and sysadmin - in that order. Over the past two years, I've spent over half of my time dealing with spam that I would never see if the rest of you had your acts together. You're costing me money and detracting from my ability to earn my keep. And yet, over those past two years, I've cut my spam load inbound by 98-99% with very few FPs (on the order of one report per week, which is far less time than I spend proactively blocking unwanted mail from badly policed networks). I taught myself the dark art of writing sendmail rulesets, built a database of ~7K rDNS naming conventions, ~18K poorly configured mail sources that inundate my servers with bounces from mail I didn't send, ~1.7K legitimate mail hosts that have relayed spam, 419 advance fee fraud scams, phishing frauds, or otherwise so utterly failed to police your own network egress points that we've blocked mail from you altogether. Where are the rest of you and why aren't you doing this? If I, and my little 7-man company, can afford to have me solve the problem on our end, why the heck can't you do the same? If I can do it, as the lone admin in a 7-man company, I should think that anyone on this list could do it. But I don't see it. All I see is arguing over whether or not to implement this or that BCP, or this or that antispam measure, or this or that anti-backscatter measure, or this or that antivirus measure. Get on with it. Email is dying, if it isn't already dead. The killer app isn't the Web, it's email. If email dies, who will want Internet services? You'll all be out pounding pavement and wishing you'd had the guts to do what you know is right and necessary. It's not possible for anyone here to say they didn't see it coming. The Cassandras have been screaming loudly, and often clearly, for years. Profoundly disappointed in the utter moral bankruptcy and cowardice of the NANOG constituency, Steve -- join us! http://hesketh.com/about/careers/web_designer.html join us! hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com join us! http://hesketh.com/about/careers/account_manager.html join us!