Interesting People mailing list archives
Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 16:53:59 -0500
------ Forwarded Message From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net> Organization: -ENOENT Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 07:06:44 +0530 To: <dave () farber net> Cc: <GLIGOR1 () aol com>, <netwriter () ap org> Subject: Re: [IP] Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 17:53 -0500, David Farber wrote:
From: <GLIGOR1 () aol com>
Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability
That article kind of overstates things. Bad spam filtering? Sure. But saying that spam filtering imperils email reliablity is wrong, and does no credit at all to several people working at large ISPs, who walk a continuous tightrope between rejecting spam inbound to their users mailboxes and blocking legitimate email. Or, if you choose, ISPs could shut off all spam filtering, and as some people advocate, dump all the mail in users' mailboxes and allow them to sort it out. In which case 1. The users would be buried in a sea of spam 2. Technically less savvy users would not be able to filter it out 3. Once it is delivered and stored at the ISP, costs for bandwidth, storage etc have been incurred - a fraction of a cent per spam, millions of spams a day. Guess where these costs will eventually be passed on? It would have been far better if this article was a call for responsible spam filtering, that kept in mind the ISP's main job of delivering email that their users want, to their mailbox. In fact I'll be speaking on a couple of panels that discuss exactly this (responsible spam filtering, of both inbound and outbound spam) at MAAWG (www.maawg.org) from march 1-3 in San Diego. MAAWG is an grouping of abuse desk managers from several ISPs around the world, and so far as I can see, is about the only conference of its kind that attracts a bunch of operationally relevant people - abuse desk and mail system administrators, my peers at other ISPs, as opposed to the usual mix of product vendors and marketing folk that you can find at most other ISP oriented antispam conferences that I've seen in the United States. There are other conferences too, more academic in nature and slightly less concerned with the implementation of proposed solutions so that they'll scale to a large mail system millions of users in size, but that's a different story altogether :) Speaking of antispam conferences, I'm just back from organizing an APCAUCE conference at Kyoto, during APRICOT 2005. The highlight of this was a panel featuring Dave Crocker (author of BATV and CSV), Jim Fenton of Cisco (author of the identified internet mail proposal) and Meng Wong (author of SPF), the focus of which was to discuss these proposals from an operator perspective as opposed to the purely technological view you'd get when discussing these at an IETF. More about this when I get the presentations and conference minutes uploaded. regards -suresh ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
Current thread:
- Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability David Farber (Feb 25)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability David Farber (Feb 26)
- Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability David Farber (Feb 26)
- Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability David Farber (Feb 27)