From markb@infi.net Thu Apr 17 19:49 PDT 1997
Tell me about it. In the course of today's activities, I learned that one of our users with a small commercial web site on one of our servers spammed the net from an account on another ISP. The spam contained a pointer to his URL on our server.
The spammer in this case is not misusing any of your resources. A web provider stands on a very tenuous ground. I fail to understand those--who would vandalize your network or incite others to vandalize it--who want to force that choice on you:
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
I certainly don't condone any attacks on AGIS but I think this should be a lesson that Internet users expect a certain standard of behavior from network providers. While there may be no legal imperative to force network providers to ehave in a certain way, the will of the people has a way of making itself felt and we ignore it at our peril.
(Internet users != hackers) I understand the will of the people to boycot a certain company or a product, but breaking into others' property? Sophistry like above deserves some of the blame for the break-ins.
Some of the mail seems to be holding us partially culpable for the spam. I'm happy to report that the other ISP is taking action against the spam complaint, but I don't know of any interpretation of Netiquette that condemns commercial WWW sites. I don't know that I'd favor an abuse policy that encompasses WWW sites, even if they are listed elsewhere in spam mailings,
Where does one draw the line? The phone company that gives phone service to the email spammer, the gazillion dollar software and hardware companies that sell their pc/email/browser products to the spammers? Break into them? It is easy to imagine the company some of the extermist anti-spammers would be keeping, at this rate. This issues has relevance to nanog--the veiled encouragement to break-ins I see here does result into network operational problems, more than most of the spams do. Sanjay. PS. I don't condone spamming, my company disconnect accounts that spam _from_ our network.