On 09/07/05, Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> wrote:
On Wed, 6 Jul 2005 trainier@kalsec.com wrote:
The second issue with boycotting, is the false positives.
No, the *point* of the boycott is the "false positives". ISPs *will* react when their general users find themselves unable to send e-mail because the entire netspace of the offending ISP is blocked (boycotted).
It depends, of course, on who is doing the spam filtering. I've seen several people I respect, doing good and sensible filtering that is as surgical as possible, but remarkably effective given that this filtering is applied at 800 lb gorilla sites. I've also seen some people, with root and/or enable on remarkably large networks, who don't realize that good spam filtering is not just knowing the syntax for "access list 101 deny" or "vi /etc/mail/access, then makemap hash access.db < access"., and who I wouldn't trust to be postmaster@etch-a-sketch, let alone on a production cluster of mailservers. Kind of the difference in effect that a fused bundle of dynamite has, when it is used by * A trained mining engineer * Wile E Coyote Though, to be fair, Wile E affects only himself, and he's back up and running within seconds even though he's interestingly blackened with frizzed eyebrows and smoking whiskers. Dumb spam filtering affects a whole lot of innocent users, a lot more than a dynamite blast or a fall off a high cliff into high voltage power lines seems to affect Wile E. --srs -- Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)