"Based on my conversations last week, Comcast's network engineers would like to be more aggressive. But the marketing department shot down a ban on port 25 because of its circa $58 million price ...
Thats quite ok, if theyre unwilling to filter port 25 on their end, we are more than happy to filter port 25 on our end. Many have already done this.
right, me too, but a surprising number of my friends strangely believe that their ~1Mbit/sec home dsl connection (which 100millions of less-clued people have) should be able to originate e-mail the same way their ~1Mbit/sec work DS-1 line (which only a few million had, and most of those cluefully) did. therefore, while i reject e-mail from dsl on a wholesale basis, i have to whitelist certain friends on a retail basis -- which is madness without end. far better for the cable and dsl providers to kill off outbound smtp by default and then re-enable it when a customer waves the right clue-flag. [off-topic: lots of you/us have proposed global whitelists to solve this kind of thing, but nobody has yet figured out how a scalable community can have a single definition of "that which is good"... so don't start that thread again just because it seems desireable (which it is) and technically easy (also).] -- Paul Vixie