[20973] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Despamming wholesale dialup
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dean Anderson)
Fri Oct 30 14:33:38 1998
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 13:52:19 -0500
To: "Scott Gifford" <sgifford@tir.com>, "Harold Willison" <harold@agis.net>,
"Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>
From: Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
At 05:33 PM 10/29/98 -0500, Scott Gifford wrote:
> An interesting answer to the problem you discussed above was suggested by
>somebody from the EFF at a spam BOF at USENIX this summer. He suggested
>that by default, you filter on port 25. But if somebody needs access for
>legitimate reasons, or even if they don't, have a letter they can fill out,
>sign, and send in which states that they will not send spam, subject to a
>$500/message penalty. Then if they do, just bill them.
One problem is that the wholesale provider may not have permission to do
this. You must obtain permission from a party to the communication prior to
interfering with it, unless it qualifies as an abuse.
You should be aware that the pro-spammers have a bill in Congress to
explicitly define spam as a legitimate activity, ie not an abuse. It will
likely be passed in this session. I tried to tell people a year and a half
ago that spammers were closely associated with an advertising lobby that
would be effective on this is issue, and that they needed to try a more
reasonable approach. But they insisted "I was wrong".
So "Spam fighting" is now a lost cause, which should not be discussed on
Nanog anyway.
--Dean
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Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com
LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP http://www.av8.com
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