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Re: Blocking mail from bad places
From: Thomas Leavitt <thomas () thomasleavitt org>
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:19:47 -0700
The only practical way to handle the volume of spam email that was hitting my servers was to implement very very aggressive filtering at the server accept level (requiring valid HELO commands that match to an existing host, among other things - amazing how many servers from major sites that initiate a HELO using a non-existent hostname)... and a friend of mine who manages a whole series of servers, has taken it to the next level: he implements his spam blocking via firewall (the disadvantage is that the logging is much more sparse, and the error messages much less descriptive).
The alternative is the absurdity that a local ISP has: a 14 way cluster for mail acceptance, and another 20 way cluster for mail storage and retrieval with terabytes of storage space, 90% of the resources (or more) of which are taken up accepting and storing as much spam as possible... and this is an ISP with a few thousand dial up and DSL customers, and a small datacenter with three rows of racks. ... and none of these resource usages are billed back to the customers... they're just overhead.
The current situation with email is flat out insane. There is no other way to describe it.
Email quaint? You betcha - my kids and their friends do "email" all the time: via MySpace and the equivalents, no SMTP required. They wouldn't know what an email client was if you hit them over the head with it.
Thomas michael.dillon () bt com wrote:
You cannot mandate how hard somebody must work. It doesn't work. Makeit'expensive enough' to be wrong, and *then* they will make thenecessary effortto be 'right'.Some people block mail from bad places in an attempt to hurt the bad place, i.e. in an etempt to make it expensive for them to be bad. But nowadays there are so many bad places, so much SPAM that leaks through filters, and so many missing emails, that it becomes harder and harder to hurt the bad places by blocking email. Nowadays it is normal for email to mysteriously bounce, to go missing, to get delivered days or months late. Soon Internet email will be like IRC, a quaint service for Internet enthusiasts and oldtimers, but not a useful tool for businesses or ordinary individuals. --Michael Dillon
Current thread:
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names, (continued)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Douglas Otis (Apr 01)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Kradorex Xeron (Apr 01)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Kradorex Xeron (Apr 01)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Petri Helenius (Apr 01)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Fergie (Apr 01)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Paul Vixie (Apr 01)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Gadi Evron (Apr 01)
- RE: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Lasher, Donn (Apr 02)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Andy Davidson (Apr 03)
- Blocking mail from bad places michael.dillon (Apr 03)
- Re: Blocking mail from bad places Thomas Leavitt (Apr 03)
- Re: Blocking mail from bad places Ken Simpson (Apr 03)
- Re: Blocking mail from bad places Chris Owen (Apr 03)
- Re: Blocking mail from bad places Thomas Leavitt (Apr 03)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Andy Davidson (Apr 03)
- what registrars need to do with no incentive [was: Re: On-going ..] Gadi Evron (Apr 02)
- Re: On-going Internet Emergency and Domain Names Joseph S D Yao (Apr 02)