[13073] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Spam Control Considered Harmful
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jordan Mendelson)
Tue Oct 28 14:04:40 1997
From: Jordan Mendelson <jordy@wserv.com>
To: "nanog@merit.edu" <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 13:43:43 -0500
On Tuesday, October 28, 1997 11:27 AM, Alex Bligh [SMTP:amb@gxn.net] wrote:
> > The Moral Majority and The Promise Keepers and other fundamentalist groups
> > sit on white horses waiting to ride in and save us from ourselves. What is
> > being said below needs to be considered. Firstly, Paul mentioned the need
> > to have strong checks and balances. What does that mean and how do we keep
> > him honest and ensure "we are using our powers for good"?
I personally do spam filtering for our site. Actually, it's not "spam"
filtering per se. If you don't have a domain in the from addr which resolves,
your mail is rejected. If you are not a customer of ours and try to relay mail
off our servers, your mail is rejected.
This to me seems completely just. Why should you send mail with a false return
to address and why if you are not my customer should you send mail?
Now, filtering based on hostname & blackholing is a bit extreme. It limits the
user's right to choose. As long as the commercial soliciter has a valid
reply-to address which you can use to bitch and complain, then I feel it's
fine.
However, I believe repeated unsolicited commercial email is harassment. For the
same reason you can't call a person on the phone in the US 4 or 5 times
unsolicited (it's against the law last I checked). It's wasting my time. On the
Internet, it's wasting my bandwidth and resources.
Does anyone have any stats on what percentage of networks is spam? I figure
probably around 5%.
Jordan
--
Jordan Mendelson : www.wserv.com/~jordy/
Web Services, Inc. : www.wserv.com
