Politech mailing list archives
FC: Spam fighting as censorship, blocking legit email messages
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 1999 01:59:26 -0400
[I will be on vacation in Big Sur until next Wednesday. --DBM] ********* Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 15:03:58 -0400 To: declan () well com From: Andrew Shen <shen () epic org> Subject: Re: FC: Police raid noisy party hosted by government anti-noise committee
Unfortunately, the HHS bureaucrats only put the proposed regulations online in WordPerfect form. Go figure.
Declan -- The 34 pages of regulations are available on the EPIC website, http://www.epic.org in HTML and PDF. Andy ********* To: declan () well com cc: politech () vorlon mit edu, gnu () toad com Subject: Re: FC: US company bans email from all .co.uk addresses -- spammers! In-reply-to: <19991029181616.WRCZ20426 () alaptop hotwired com> Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:08:35 -0700 From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com> X-UIDL: babec9550b301d2e7b86731f7f71b899
shows that problems can be fixed pretty quickly on both sides of the Atlantic: The overbroad spam block gets lifted, and the UK university gives the boot to the spammer. --DBM]
Actually what it shows is the opposite. Internet users had to complain to their correspondents using some other medium, like a telephone. Then those correspondents had to complain to their ISP before they were "permitted" to receive mail from those corerspondents. This was not an isolated incident. The tactics and reactions of anti-spammers are far worse than the tactics of the spammers. Spammers don't prevent ordinary, legitimate mail from getting through. The anti-spammers regularly block real peoples' *wanted* email.
IDT has now relaxed its bans. The University of Leeds has traced its problem to a security hole that allowed someone outside to use one of its servers to relay spam.
This was not a security hole at all. Email transport agents are designed to always forward mail onward toward its destination, and have been designed that way from the beginning of the Internet. Anti-spammers have seized on this as a "hole" that lets "unwanted" people forward their email through third parties. They have built blacklists -- that's what they call them -- of sites that run mailers which will try to deliver misdirected email rather than reject it. Making such email "bounce" back to its sender is an abomination. This isn't a hole, it's a feature, and one that my friends regularly use as their own ISP's make it harder and harder for them to deliver their mail any other way. (If you're a customer of, say, AOL, and you plug your laptop into the Ethernet at a friend's office, AOL won't accept your outgoing mail. To be able to send mail to anyone, you'd have to reconfigure your mailer to send it to somewhere else. For people who travel a lot and jack in anywhere, this is error-prone and tedious; it quickly becomes intolerable.) The problem exists because the anti-spammers can't strike out at the spammers, because they can't easily identify them. So they strike out at a broad range of Internet users who look sort-of-like the spammers. And they're so mad about spam that they don't particularly care who gets hurt in the process. I sent a short note to a colleague at CERN yesterday. We both work with the Internet Society, but usually see each other in mailing lists rather than sending mail directly between us. The message bounced at CERN's mail gateway, with the message "toad.com: this domain is banned." A short complaint I sent to postmaster () CERN CH was returned with the same remark. Governments don't need to make us censor the Internet -- we're doing it to ourselves. And the people being censored are the ones who believe in open communication, and having machines be helpful to misrouted mail instead of hostile to it. The real cure is to block only massive quantities of unsolicited email. Small quantities of unsolicited email, like my note to CERN, should go through. Massive quantities of solicited email, such as mailing lists that people deliberately subscribe to, should also go through. Software can measure massive quantities (though no anti-spam software currently does!!), but it can't tell whether the email is solicited or not. Making that judgment requires having humans in the loop. Rather than programming our machines to refuse all doubtful communications and hoping any real people can find some other way to reach us, we should program them to detect massive quantities and delay the mail until someone spends two seconds to decide if it's spam or legit. Each of us does that every day in our email already, but our software isn't automating it so that when the first fifty people call it spam, the rest of us don't have to read it any more. John ******* From: "David Smith" <david_smith () unforgettable com> To: <declan () well com> Subject: RE: US company bans email from all .co.uk addresses -- spammers! Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 23:24:40 -0500 Message-ID: <NABBLEJKEPNIBFGBDJOKIEINDPAA.david_smith () unforgettable com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal I'm continually amazed at how anti-spammers are given a free ride by the press, by their customers, and by the online community. You could write "Oh golly gee, I guess we went a little overboard going after those nasty spammers" stories every single day of the week. If this had been a censorware company, there would have been howls of protest, but since we are talking about anti-spam efforts, the notion of holding IDT accountable for their actions is unthinkable and unspeakable. David Smith david_smith () unforgettable com http://www.aclutx.org/chapters/central ********** -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to majordomo () vorlon mit edu with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- FC: Spam fighting as censorship, blocking legit email messages Declan McCullagh (Oct 29)