On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Andy Davidson <andy@nosignal.org> wrote:
On 22 Jun 2008, at 17:17, Paul Vixie wrote:
with EC2, it's game-over for the IP reputation industry,
I was discussing this on an e-commerce practitioners list earlier today, and argued basically that, from an abuse point of view, EC2 is the same as any other bad neighborhood, and that operators needing to make impact fast, will treat it as they do any other bad neighborhood.
I have to agree with Andy. There's simple math involved of how much good mail versus how much bad mail is coming from a network, and very few ISPs seem shy about blocking IPs or netblocks that cross those thresholds. Even if Paul is somehow correct about this becoming game changing for the concept of IP reputation, good people (non-spammers) using the EC2 platform are going to run into a lot of delivery pain, as existing ISP and blacklist reputation mechanisms have yet to give EC2 users a free pass, from what I've observed so far. I'm not going to pretend I manage inbound mail service for thousands-to-millions of users (as most of the participants of other lists like SPAM-L are fond of imagining themselves), but I know enough about how IP reputation systems work at ISPs to know that if I did manage inbound mail for such a userbase, the EC2 IPs would be blocked repeatedly and often, and there would come a point where the blocks escalate to /24s and larger, and there would come a point where the blocks are removed slower and less often. How the EC2 space is managed is not really new or exciting, as far as outbound mail goes. Regards, Al Iverson -- Al Iverson on Spam and Deliverability, see http://www.spamresource.com News, stats, info, and commentary on blacklists: http://www.dnsbl.com My personal website: http://www.aliverson.com -- Chicago, IL, USA Remove "lists" from my email address to reach me faster and directly.