In article <a2937c33050330225673348cdf@mail.gmail.com> you write:
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:33:49 -0800, Alexei Roudnev <alex@relcom.net> wrote:
Heard of a little thing called 'spam'?
So what? You can use your car as a weapon; should we prohibit you from car driving?
No, but if your car doesn't have seat belts, we don't let you drive it. Basic SMTP lacks safety features that are needed, ergo, retrictions were placed on it.
Basic SMTP is fine. You all use it today. I will use it to send this message. SMTP is not better or worse than the postal service in identifying the sender and we have lived with the possability of fraudulent mail for centuries. People have this idiotic expectation that because the mail is being delivered by a computer rather than a postie that the identity of the sender is somehow magically authenticated. The real issue is that it is hard to police customer machines and it is cheeper to turn off SMTP than it is to identify, inform and help fix customer machines. Sooner or later ISPs will have to start doing this as the people compromising machines have shown a long history of getting around all the blocks put in their way. Spam is just a minor annoyance compared to what they could potentially be doing with the compromised machines.
As was mentioned, my point was just that the question posited was flawed. SMTP isn't restricted for competition and money-making reasons, but because to not restrict it can have quite undesired implications. The question was why was one ok, and the other not. The answer is because of spam.
Jamie