Re: Paul's Mailfrom (Was: IETF SMTP Working Group Proposal at

[David Van Duzer <dvanduzer () infidels org>]

On Mon, 2002-08-26 at 21:08, Paul Vixie wrote:
> ...and, occasionally, your ISP's "abuse desk."  If this function of your ISP
> costs less than 1 FTE per 10,000 dialups or 1,000 T1's or 100 T3's, then your
> ISP is a slacker and probably a magnet for professional spammers as well.  If


Not to try to undercut the general point, but that would imply that
Earthlink, AOL, and MSN (for examples) should have a combined abuse
department of roughly 1500 employees.  Well, perhaps those were poor
examples then.  It would be wonderful if it were the case, and while it
seems like laziness when we talk about the big guys, most middle sized
providers just don't have the operating budgets to not slack at least a
little bit.  The simple things you referred to would be designed to make
the function of abuse personnel / subscribers look more logarithmic, but
this whole thread and all the other arguments stem from the fact that it
really isn't that simple.  Spam is a social problem, but no one seems to
think that solving it socially (a la paying for well staffed abuse
departments) is the answer.  So as you suggest, the solution is a
combination of social and technical answers, keeping that personnel
ratio manageable.  But this debate (I'm not debating with *you*) keeps
coming around full circle.  Perhaps the real social problem is
convincing whatever standards bodies and vendors necessary that it is a
technical problem.  There seems to be far too much apathy (FUD?) rather
than just designing a partial solution, however imperfect, and
implementing it.

-dvd