On 14 Aug 2001 05:55:56 -0400, Mitch Halmu wrote:
I suspect that many other list members run, or are employed, by businesses, and make business decisions, rather than personal ones. I also happen to view Internet access as a service similar to those provided by a common carrier.
You publically advertised repeatedly that you run an open relay. If it weren't for the RBL (and presumably your link size, as an ISP without an ASN and running a single MX) your open relay would be streaming full of UBE. As it is, you're lucky -- your open relay is "poisoned" by being on many blacklists so spammers probably don't bother with it as much as other, "fresh" open relays. RBL, and formerly ORBS, are/were useful services. ORBS was a bit more contraversial than RBL/MAPS but still far more mature than those who have come to replace it such as ORBZ and ORBL, who have things like mandatory 24 hour delays before they'll do a re-check to confirm a relay as fixed and remove it from their lists. As I'm sure most medium sized ISPs can tell you, you can't be on RBL without significant customer complaints. ORBS listing would also attract a reasonable amount of complaints. RBL and ORBS listings were sufficient to coerce the largest non-multinational ISPs in Australia to change their ways and become more careful about relays. Another way of saying it - relay blocking lists (in general, not just RBL) are the e-mail communities' equivalent to the Usenet Death Penalty, which in turn has caused many a large ISP to review their Usenet spam problems -- possibly not as effectively. You talk of government control. The Internet doesn't exist under one government. Even the ISP I work for spans half a dozen governments ranging from one with extreme censorship, a virtual police state to a country where it costs less than a single note to get someone killed. Consider this. The users vote with their custom to the ISP. The ISPs vote with their configuration and choose the trusted community members who can determine who is right and who is wrong. Paul Vixie is one of those trusted members of the internet community. As to inconvenience, in each country we handle multi-level open relay cases involving our clients daily. At a university I worked at, I developed a class B network scanner to scan for open relays in a class B of address space in under a minute in order to prevent open relays at the university. Initially there were many hundreds; in fact, in March 1998, 255 of our 394 mail servers at that university were open relays. But by August that year, that number had dropped to 13 of the 230 machines which remained as mail servers (almost half the machines which were running e-mail servers at the university were doing it because it was installed by default). Sure, it's a major hassle to clamp down on all open relays -- but open relays are used for the transfer of massive amounts of spam to avoid the blacklisting of the original source. We're even having to code new restrictions for formmail.pl scripts all over the place because spammers are abusing formmail.pl scripts (forged headers to make the submission look legit to the traditional criteria for a valid post) out of desperation now that open relays are becoming increasingly rare. I guess you block SpamCop reports too as an intrusion on your time or your free rights to determine what is abuse and what isn't? -- David Luyer Phone: +61 3 9674 7525 Engineering Projects Manager P A C I F I C Fax: +61 3 9699 8693 Pacific Internet (Australia) I N T E R N E T Mobile: +61 4 1111 2983 http://www.pacific.net.au/ NASDAQ: PCNTF