[69604] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Lazy network operators
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS)
Thu Apr 15 03:11:43 2004
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 02:10:58 -0500
From: "Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS" <billstewart@att.com>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
As far as your own incoming mail is concerned,
you get the same results by either requiring almost every ISP in the =
world
to block outgoing SMTP from almost all of their users,=20
or by using a blocking list that blocks the same users.
The blocking list approach preserves the end-to-end behavior of the =
Internet,
and lets the end users decide whose opinions to follow about
which Internet users are first-class citizens vs. second-class citizens.
=20
Of course, I was planning to write that comparison before
the recent complaints about how bad a job SORBS is doing
on deciding who to block. :-) But it's still equivalent.
If an ISP wants to be "responsible" about preventing untrustworthy users
from sending SMTP that bothers people, they can contribute to blocking =
lists
rather than dropping the users' packets, and the blocking lists can =
provide
some convenient mechanism for the ISPs to update them. =20
Where the two approaches diverge is that the recipient-based approaches
can also support whitelists, either individually run or=20
shared exception systems such as Habeas or bonded sender things,
while the ISP-blocking approach isn't something you can easily override,
except by doing tunneling or other protocol-heavy workarounds.
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
