Re: Anti-Spam Router -- opinions?

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () darkwing uoregon edu>]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Apr 2004 13:14:31 EDT, Matthew Crocker said:
>
> > IF you can rate-limit them across the whole Internet,  If you limit 2 
> > million machines to 20 msgs/day per mail server you are back up to your 
> > 10 Billion msgs/day mark.  This is where DCC or other distributed 
> > checksum systems come into play.
>
> My point was that there's no real *need* to distinguish between a legitimate
> user sending 20 emails and an 0wned box sending 20 emails, as the distinction
> is "legitimate 20 emails" versus "0wned 20K emails".
>
> If I were to only give my users 20 outbound connections/day, there wouldn't be
> a per-mail-server issue. Whether I can make such a policy stick is another
> question entirely.

I sent more than 20 mails in the last hour. Given that I have a local mta 
each of those results in a seperate connection attempts to the machine I 
use as smart-host. I'm sure I could batch them all up and send them at 
once thereby returning to my uucp days, but bleh, that really breaks up 
the pattern of back-and-forth communication that we've gotten used to.

There's a bunch of forces pushing in various directions that make email 
less usable for me and I assume everyone else... The big one is spam, 
restricitive mta behavior is another, and there are others. When my mta 
becomes more selective about what senders I choose to accept mail from or 
in this case when or how often, then eventually I lose mail from people I 
would otherwise have communicated with. That's frustrating becuase it's as 
disruptive, if not more so than having a mail box full of crap.  

Eventually I suspect I'll be forced to abandon the rfc2821 email system as 
a communications tool entirely, and brick myself up in the cellar, but I 
actuallly liked it as a tool when it worked.

joelja
>

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Joel Jaeggli           Unix Consulting         joelja () darkwing uoregon edu    
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