[64417] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Heads-up: AT&T apparently going to whitelist-only inbound mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kee Hinckley)
Wed Oct 22 15:49:24 2003
In-Reply-To: <20031022184359.536CF7B43@berkshire.research.att.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 15:33:34 -0400
To: Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul@somewhere.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 2:43 PM -0400 10/22/03, Steve Bellovin wrote:
>Customers who received e-mail bulletins from AT&T Monday and Tuesday
>requesting specific information are advised to disregard those
>messages. They were inadvertently sent out in error and we apologize
>for any confusion or inconvenience they may have caused.
That reminds me of the time the new head of security at Apollo
announced that they were going to be saving money by turning off the
power and locking the buildings on weekends. That afternoon on the
way out there were fliers that sounded almost exactly like that
paragraph. It was just a misunderstanding.
However, what AT&T was trying to do, however clumsily, isn't that
different from what companies like AOL and MSN do, where certain IP
addresses get red carpet treatment through the mail servers, while
others are more closely examined. It doesn't surprise me that
non-ISP companies are starting to look at the same kind of things.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Next Generation Spam Defense
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
