From: "Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>
I agree. MHSC lost an entire market plan, hosting third-party secure mail, becasue third-party mail services must allow relaying that is at minimum semi-open. At the time SMTP AUTH didn't exist (Until it's use becomes more wide-spread it still isn't real useful). The anti-relay bunch are killing a valid business model.
This brings up an interesting point that I haven't seen discussed much. What should happen when various business models for using the internet conflict? Who gets to decide? Or how do we collect and distribute the information so individual sites can decide for themselves? I think all the examples I know about involve network abuse, or at least activities that will be considered as network abuse by many sensible people. Maybe the common theme is cost-shifting. I'm including support costs as well as up-front traffic/server costs. The obvious example is an ISP who wants to take spammers as customers, or host web servers for spammers. The next example is an ISP with a good looking anti-spam section in their AUP but they take a long time to enforce it. How long should it take to disconnect a flagrant spammer? ... How about ISPs that tolerate crackers or smurfers? What about ISPs that are just slow or incompetent at backtracking abusive traffic with forged headers or setting up filters to drop forged headers from their customers? AllAdvantage is another good example to consider. I have no interest in what they offer and I generally like having new/different businesses connected to the internet. But their system encourages spam, so we all get to pay for AllAdvantage's business in increased spam-fighting costs. I'm sure they could stop the spam (or rather almost all of it), but that would increase their costs. Another example that was recently mentioned was ISPs that are teaming up with phone companies. The phone company does the billing and gives the ISP a cut so the ISP doesn't have to keep customer records and hence those ISPs will have troubles disconnecting crackers. Again, the ISPs could do a reasonable job of making sure their customers are good netizens, but it will raise their cost of doing business.