On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:51:13 CST, you said:
of abusive mail. After all, it does take time to read and act upon abuse reports. By forcing smtp through a specific server at least some proactive measures are possible such as throttling abusive behaviour.
Forcing it through a server doesn't automagically add the ability to throttle abusive behavior. It's merely the obvious sledgehammer fix. Now consider a router that's instrumented to collect flow data, feeding a real-time system that throttles the port if something abusive happens. You get the same benefits of not having to read and act on abuse reports, plus you don't break non-abusive uses of the network. (And yes, we consider that a primary tool - we got lots of "your user has Witty" e-mails, and *every single one* we already knew about because we'd pulled the flow data and done the obvious things....)