On Wed, 17 Jun 1998, Dean Anderson wrote:
Vix and I have been in agreement that we need a test case. I volunteered to try and find such evidence last year, but I can't. What I've found is that ***no major NSP's block spammers***, or least none actually admit to
I can't imagine why they would. You can't spam a router.
If you are an NSP, and you are blocking a spammer from transiting your network, where you have no relationship with the parties to the email (the
We are not an NSP, and if we were, we would block as little as possible because blocking costs. If our downstreams want to block traffic, they can pay us or they can block it themselves. And by the way, blocking spam sites at the packet level doesn't make much sense to me. In the first place, very little spam (in porportion to the total) comes from actual spam sites. If you want to effectively filter spam, you have to do it at the MTA and MDA levels, and since you need to maintain access lists for that, why have a second set of access lists for your routers? And what kind of an informative error message does a Cisco send to some poor bastard who's blocked because of his broken mailerserver? There's also a tradeoff between bandwidth and cpu usage when you are filtering packets. Maybe it would work out to be cheaper if let the packets through and then reject the spam at the smtp level.
If you are really doing what you claim you can, then someone should provide some evidence.
I didn't claim what you think i did. I claimed only that it's feasable and legal (US) for us to insist that people follow our AUP if they want to use our network. People who don't respect us will have trouble sending us email, getting our nameservers to answer their questions, etc. Bill