Sent from my iPad On Sep 3, 2010, at 10:10 PM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Really? So, since so many ISPs are blocking port 25, there's lots less spam hitting our networks?
It's been extremely effective in blocking spam sent by spambots on large ISPs. It's not a magic anti-spam bullet. (If you know one, please let us know.)
That simply hasn't been my experience. I still get lots of spam from booted hosts in large provider networks, and yes, that includes many that block 25. As near as I can tell, 25 blocking is not affecting spammers at all, just legitimate users. There was a time when it was effective, but the spammers have long since adapted. Now we are only breaking the Internet. We are no ,onger accomplishing anything ireful. It's pure momentum.
workaround. Since, like many of us, I use a lot of transient networks, having to reconfigure for each unique set of brokenness is actually wasting more of my time than the spam this brokenness was alleged to prevent.
Is there some reason you aren't able to configure your computers to use tunnels or SUBMIT? They seem to work pretty well for other people.
Many of the transient networks I deal with block 22, 25, 465, and 587. They also often block protocols 41 and 43 or do not provide a public address, rendering those protocols unusable anyway. Yes, I am now running ssh and s,tp processes on ports 80 and 443 to get around this, but, that consumes an extra address for something that should be handled by a port number. Personally, i'd rather use port numbers for l4 uniqueness rather than IP Addresses. Owen
R's, John