Re: AS11296 -- Hijacked?

[Robert Bonomi <bonomi () mail r-bonomi com>]

> Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:06:31 -0700
> Subject: Re: AS11296 -- Hijacked?
> From: Scott Howard <scott () doc net au>
>
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 9:26 AM, N. Yaakov Ziskind <awacs () ziskind us> wrote:
>
>
> Recommendations such as that are only as credible as the source they are
> coming from, and knowing that the person making the request also believes
> that blocking all mail from gmail.com is a valid anti-spam technique
> probably results in a "different" credibility level than one might otherwise
> have.

I have to ask one question -- who are _you_ to judge what is 'valid' for
*HIS* situation?

He's not running a 'provider' network, with any responsibility to others,
it's his personal environment.

On _my_ personal servers, I block *LARGE* swaths of the world -- because
I _do_ get significant amounts of spam from those locales, and have *zero*
expectation of any 'legitimate' mail therefrom.  The service denial messages
_do_ provide info on how to get past the blocks.  I can state with authority
that in close to a million messages so rejected, -not-a-single-one- has been
from someone with a serious interest in communicationg with me.  The web-page
with the explanatory data has not had so much as a single hit in over 8 years.
Now, on systems I manage for others, I do things very differently, according 
to -their- needs.

The rationale for such decisions is straightforward, and easy to understand.
It's called the 'cost-benefit' ratio.  _How_much_ work does it take to let
that 'rare' piece of 'useful' mail through from a source that generates
almost exclusively spam, and _is_ getting that occasional piece of mail
'worth the effort'.  Ron has decided 'not', with regard to gmail.  To
argue that decision, _you_ would have to know how much 'valid' traffic
he can reasonably expect to get from gmail, and the amount of effort it
would take in his existing environment to accomplish that end.