>Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "meaningful"? As someone >who uses the DUL list as an anti-spam mechanism and who experiments >with turning it off and on, I can definitely say that turning it on >reduces the amount of spam I receive (on the order of about 100 >messages a day).
Certainly. Here's another good spam-blocking strategy: Turn off your SMTP listener. Although highly effective at stopping spam, this method is not meaningful. Perhaps I should have used a better word, such as "selective", to imply methods that are much more likely to stop spam than non-spam. The MAPS DUL does not discriminate between spam or non-spam, or even between users who have generated spam in the past and those that do not. If you're a dialup user, you are automatically guilty of spamming even if you can prove yourself innocent. >I recognize that it also harms folks like you for many of the reasons >you give. But I don't understand why you say it is not a meaningful >anti-spam mechanism. Here's another way that the MAPS DUL is not meaningful. Comcast, which just put all their cable modem IP address blocks in the MAPS DUL, says that if you upgrade to one of their expensive commercial services you can get a block of static IP addresses instead of one dynamic address. And those static addresses will not be placed on the MAPS DUL. So if all you have to do to evade a supposed anti-spam mechanism is to pay some more money to your ISP, do you still consider that mechanism to be "meaningful"? Or is it just a way for your ISP to cynically profit from spam with a mechanism they claim to be anti-spam? Phil