On Sunday, February 23, 2003, at 01:43 PM, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
2. I agree with the rest of your comment: (to borrow a bit from what
you went on to say) I too have great sympathy for the people trying
to stop the spam -- UNLESS they're also the people responsible for the spam.
For instance, I have no sympathy at all for Yahoo, since Yahoo Stores
allows spammers to operate with impunity from its space: doesn't matter
who reports them, how many times, how clear/murky the evidence is, etc.:
they do *nothing*.
You'll want to read this then:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000525.html
And then they turn around and tout their anti-spam measures to their subscribers.
They really seem to have been working at closing holes in yahoogroups. for a while, that was a real pesthole, adn the spam being sent to yahoo lists seems to be getting under control.
Which doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing this ALSO...
Part of this may be due to economic conditions: turning off a paying customer, even a spammer, doesn't go over well when co-lo centers sit mostly empty.
Of course, that's the same reason supermarkets don't enforce 10 items or less. they only see the customer they don't want to piss off. They don't see the customers that get pissed and never come back without complaining...
others hew with a broadsword. NONE of them would exist if ISPs would just Do The Right Thing, because we all have better things to do with our time than spend it tweaking the anti-spam stuff.
I'm not really sure that's true.
First, define "right thing"
reality: spam isn't illegal. Until THAT changes, "right thing" is up for interpretation on very many levels. if it's not illegal, it's hard to take the moral high ground against it.
Second, at a high level, we ALL hate spam, at a more detailed level, we basically can't agree on what it is, and that seriously splits our attempts to get anything done, because nobody in the anti-spam world seems to have figured out it's better to get the easy stuff first and then make another run at the next set, so nobody really seems to be trying to get together and solve that first set of spam everyone can agree on.
Third, thanks to the high preponderance of open relays overseas, it's not always easy for ISPs to do the right thing, since the place where the spam comes from isn't within control of the ISP, even if the bastard controlling those open relays is.
but the big issue is we all may hate spam, but it's not illegal. Until it is, ISPs will continue to make the argument that it's business. And frankly, they're right.
-- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/
But I can hear the sound Of slamming doors and folding chairs And that's a sound they'll never know
