--On Saturday, September 20, 2003 2:46 PM -0700 Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
I still disagree with this. To prevent SPAM, people shouldn't run open relays and the open relay problem should be solved. Breaking legitimate port 25 traffic is a temporary hack.
Very little spam coming off dialups and other dynamically assigned, "residential" type connections has anything to do with open relays. The vast majority of it is related to open proxies (which the machine owners do not realize they are running) and machines that have been compromised by various viruses and exploits. These are machines that should not be running outbound mailservers, and in most cases, the owners neither intend nor believe that their systems are sending mail. Merely stating that people shouldn't run open relays didn't stop spam four years ago and it is less likely to do so now. My guess is that you haven't heard of the current issue with various servers running SMTP AUTH. These MTAs are secure by normal mechanisms, but are being made to relay spam anyway. It's hard enough to get mailservers secured when they are maintained by real sysadmins on static IPs with proper and informative PTR records. When the IP addresses sourcing the spam are moving targets, with "generic" PTR records, and the machines are being operated by end users with no knowledge that their computer is even capable of sending direct to MX mail, the situation is impossible to solve without ISP intervention via Port filtering, etc.
If the person running the system in question chooses to do so, yes, they should be able to do so.
If the person running the system in question wants to run server class services, such as ftp, smtp, etc, then they need to get a compatible connection to the internet. There are residential service providers that allow static IP addressing, will provide rDNS, and allow all the servers you care to run. They generally cost more than dial-ups or typical dynamic residential broadband connections. As a rule, you tend to get what you pay for. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Margie Arbon Mail Abuse Prevention System, LLC margie@mail-abuse.org http://mail-abuse.org