John Kristoff wrote:
On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 00:59:49 +0200 "Jeroen Massar" <jeroen@unfix.org> wrote:
Nice rant Randy, but if you even ever wondered why the wording "Mail Relay" exists you might see that if an ISP simply forwards all outgoing tcp port 25 traffic to one of their relays and protects that from weird spam
The point is that 25 is just a number. You'll eventually be blocking all numbers sooner or later (and re-inventing dumb terminals).
Another person who can't read. SMTP is a protocol which is based on relaying messages from one mailserver to another. An endnode (especially workstations) don't need to run SMTP. ISP/Company's already have SMTP servers which are setup to relay for their clients. So what's so bad about forwarding all tcp/25 traffic over that relay and letting that relay decide if the MAIL FROM: is allowed to be relayed? And if a client wants to mail from another domain which isn't relayed by it's upstream ISP, he/she could ask it's ISP to do so. Yes this will add an administrative hassle, but doesn't spam imply that also? The whole problem is yet again that a small amount of people (this time spammers) make a whole lot of problems for a lot of people (we). Also this setup is somewhat the same as checking from an smtp-server whether the sending server is also actually running an smtp... Fortunatly we got SpamAssasin/Razor nowadays so the spam that does get through gets filtered out without bothering me or anybody else using these tools. Greets, Jeroen