Re: Blocking mail from bad places

[Ken Simpson <ksimpson () mailchannels com>]

> 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.

Does the local ISP do any connection management? A 14 machine cluster
for a few thousand users sounds on the high side. For example, we have
an ISP customer with 20,000 accounts and just 3 edge servers.

For those who are interested, I did a talk at the MIT Spam Conference
on throttling as a way of dealing with increased spam volume. Videos
are here:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBwdWQfaskI
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGncfRZqm0

> 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.

... And not surprisingly, the new spam frontier is being quiety
fought at MySpace, SixApart, Blogger, and other social networks. There
was a very interesting presentation at the MIT Spam Conference
concerning blog spam at SixApart. Videos here:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZjArRqSc7A
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODXUE66J9B0

Regards,
Ken

> michael.dillon () bt com wrote:
> >  
> > > You cannot mandate how hard somebody must work. It doesn't work.  Make
> > >    
> > it
> >  
> > > 'expensive enough' to be wrong, and *then*  they will make the
> > >    
> > necessary effort
> >  
> > > to 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
> >  

-- 
Ken Simpson, CEO
MailChannels Corporation
Reliable Email Delivery (tm)
http://www.mailchannels.com