[ On Thursday, June 20, 2002 at 17:01:20 (-0400), David Charlap wrote: ]
Subject: Re: SPEWS?
Dan Hollis wrote:
Its my box, my hardware, my property. No one has an inherent right to force speech on an unwilling recipient.
If you're installing a blacklist on a mail server you keep at home for yourself, then yes.
If you're running an ISP with thousands of customers, then you also have to deal with how you're impacting them. Sure, it may still be your equipment, but that won't matter if you tick off your paying customers and they decide to cancel their accounts and go to your competitors.
You, or at least I, really don't want paying customers who demand to receive e-mail from known spam sources and open relays. They cost far to much in support to be worthwhile keeping -- I'd much sooner keep the good customers and get the support-heavy ones to go suck on some competitor's pipe! On the other hand a clever business person might want to set up two mailers for their customers -- one normal spam-free one; and another for those customers who want all their e-mail regardless of where it comes from. Maybe we can write up an RFC/BCP to define a standardized name like "iwantspam" for the second one, and mailboxes could always exist for every user on both servers and the users could choose to read from either or both, and the expiry policy and quotas could be set a bit lower on "iwantspam" one. :-) That way everyone who was getting bounces because they were using a spam-infested ISP would know to try sending to their friends a the standard "iwantspam" subdomain (and they could phone their friends to let them know legit e-mail was being sent there too! :-). In any case the onus is still on the sender to correct the problem, and after all they are paying the offending ISP for service too -- if they're not getting service because the offending ISP would rather have spammers than grandmas as customers then the best thing is for everyone to block the offending ISP's netblocks so that both grandma and the spammers will get the message that their service provider is no longer worth using. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098; <gwoods@acm.org>; <g.a.woods@ieee.org>; <woods@robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>