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more on Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam]
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 08:32:22 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: John Levine <johnl () iecc com> Date: April 4, 2006 7:26:32 PM EDT To: Lee Revell <rlrevell () joe-job com> Cc: dave () farber netSubject: Re: [IP] more on Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam]
"In late 2004 Verizon implemented a massive blocklist for DSL customers, that seemed to block a ton of email from outside the country -- with no way to get around the list.What a terrible precedent. No good deed goes unpunished. This kind of thing was commonplace and necessary before spam filtering became sophisticated.
It may have seemed that way in your corner of the net, but it was and is neither. Verizon has a long history of using spam filtering techniques that are clumsier and more intrusive than other ISPs, notably callbacks that simulate sending mail back to a nominal sender to check if the address on incoming mail is real. (This, of course, means, that if someone sends Verizon a spam run with your address faked as the return, Verizon will mailbomb you.) As far as I can tell, some whiz at Verizon tried to make a list of all of the foreign IP addresses that sent mail to their customers, then blocked everything else. It should have taken about two minutes for it to become clear that the whitelist was missing a lot of entries, but Verizon, being The Phone Company and therefore infallible, stonewalled and made absurd excuses rather than saying oops and backing it out. So although I entirely agree that it is counterproductive to penalize people for good-faith spam filtering mistakes, in this case, Verizon had it coming, and I hope they've learned to be more careful. Regards,John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. PS: I happen to run a country blacklist called korea.services.net which I use to block mail from most Korean ISPs. But that's because I have a small user base, I know my users, and few of them have correspondents in Korea. It would be nuts for an ISP to use it. ------------------------------------- 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/
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- more on Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam] David Farber (Apr 05)
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