Re: Affects of the balkanization of mail blacklisting

[Adam Rothschild <asr () latency net>]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 11:33:36PM -0500, measl () mfn org wrote:
> The SPAM problem goes up and down to be sure, but you know what?
> PROCMAIL is your friend.  All you need to look for are the basics
> (ADV, Make Money, etc) and you can instatly filter 90 percent of
> this trash into the bitbucket.

Please do share your operational experiences with this, with respect
to effectiveness, scalability, etc.  Sounds like a shocking revelation
-- who needs elaborate DNS or eBGP multihop-based blackhole lists,
when we can catch 90% of all spam known to man using procmail and a
simple subject regex!@?!

> At work (not mfn.org), I get several orders of magnitude more mail
> (usually obnoxious at that) from the "gentle anti-spammers" than the
> poor "victims" get themselves!

Have you tried unsubscribing yourself from the cypherpunks and spam-l
lists?

On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 01:24:16AM -0400, Mitch Halmu wrote:
> Guilty of what, Vivien? You are accusing me of being a spammer?

While you're not a spammer, you're consciously providing spammers with
an invaluable tool: an open SMTP relay to abuse freely.

> NetSide's customers were fully informed of our stance published on a
> web site dedicated to the problem, most agreed, and those that chose
> to stay and endure the year-long MAPS blockade obviously like their
> communications uncensored, and truly appreciate being able to
> transparently use their accounts from elsewhere (i.e., from the
> office).

Ahhh yes, <http://www.dotcomeon.com/> isn't the least bit biased or
factually inaccurate, right?  And secure tunneling, SMTP
authentication, and IMAP/POP-before-SMTP are hard; let's go shopping.
 
> I dare to be as bold as to imply that their agenda is akin to
> extracting "protection" money from ISPs. Do you really expect them
> to blackhole some of their paying "customers"?

Yes.  MAPS is (and has been for as long as I can recall) a reputable
organization under very close public scrutiny.  If they did something
this shady, surely someone would raise a stink.

> I am fighting his little MAPS charity based strictly on the belief
> that no private party has the right to appoint themselves as
> communications censors [...]

So, if you're so opposed to the MAPS-maintained blackholes, what are
you using to protect your massive dialup customer base from spam?

-adam