On Sun, 10 Jul 2005, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
The second issue with boycotting, is the false positives.
No, the *point* of the boycott is the "false positives". ISPs *will* react when their general users find themselves unable to send e-mail because the entire netspace of the offending ISP is blocked (boycotted).
It depends, of course, on who is doing the spam filtering.
I've seen several people I respect, doing good and sensible filtering that is as surgical as possible, but remarkably effective given that this filtering is applied at 800 lb gorilla sites.
Which is exactly what I said, too. One particular gorilla has at least started to enforce long-established RFC "standards" that most folks blindly ignored out of laziness for years.
I've also seen some people, with root and/or enable on remarkably large networks, who don't realize that good spam filtering is not just knowing the syntax for "access list 101 deny" or "vi /etc/mail/access, then makemap hash access.db < access"., and who I wouldn't trust to be postmaster@etch-a-sketch, let alone on a production cluster of mailservers.
And this is the problem -- but then, such miserably inept admins are usually also responsible for the *outflow*, and are thus working for a highly intersecting set of ISPs that should be targeted for escalation, "collateral damage", "false positive" blocking in order to get them to wake up and read documentation for once.... -- -- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>