RE: [Nolug] Cox's idea about fighting spam

Hi Scott.

I'm a small ISP, providing ADSL and dial-in. As such, I applaud Cox's move
to limit spam coming from their own customers.

Most providers complain about spam from others but do little to keep their
own house in order. Consider the fanfare surrounding the anti-spam
announcement made about a month ago by Microsoft, Yahoo and ??? (I forget
the 3rd one). These are the places where much of the spam comes from to
start with! What hypocrites they are!

Listing non-static IP "dial-in" ranges with the various RBL servers helps.
Bell South does this, for example, and I've seen it stop spam from their
users on many occasions. Blocking port 25 inbound is a stronger method, but
along the same lines. If you don't have a static IP you shouldn't be
running a mail server.

I'm not for port blocking in general, but in this case I see it as very
helpful to the Internet community in general while impacting a users' rights
very little. I think that it is a reasonable and prudent policy.

John

    John Souvestre - Southern Star - (504) 888-3348 - www.sstar.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nolug@joeykelly.net [mailto:owner-nolug@joeykelly.net] On Behalf
Of Scott Harney
Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2003 10:49 PM
To: nolug@joeykelly.net
Subject: Re: [Nolug] Cox's idea about fighting spam

On Tuesday 10 June 2003 10:39 pm, Chuck wrote:
> Oh nevermind, Scott's message cleared it up. That seems a bit more
> reasonable. Still seems to be a jip though.

Work from home types may squeal a bit since they may need to send work the
company smtp gateways (with SMTP auth). But more than likely, they're using

IPSEC tunnels anyway, thus bypassing the outbound cox filters.

I haven't decided how I want to react to this, personally. I REALLY have a
problem with ISPs deciding what I can and cannot connect to. I realize it's

all in the AUP and I certainly can see both sides of this (1). Still I
firmly believe that customers should have a mechanism to opt out of any such

filtering.(2)

1) until recently I worked for a cable ISP. I fought vehemently against
inbound port filters. This port 25 outbound filter has precedent. when I
worked in dialup, I listed all of our dynamic dialup IP pools with certain
registries that many ISPs used to reject port 25 connections. Still, the
times are a changin'
2)Yep. this is hard. It's still the absolute right thing to do.

-- 
Scott Harney <scotth@scottharney.com>
"...and one script to rule them all."
gpg key fingerprint=7125 0BD3 8EC4 08D7 321D CEE9 F024 7DA6 0BC7 94E5
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