Paul J Schinder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Clearly different. Dial-up's are usually too much trouble for an ISP
> track who was using what when. You know who's responsible for a
> university faculty machine.
Heh. Heh heh. Um... "in theory" is the phrase that comes to mind.
> (I'm aware of the student problem; my wife is a university faculty
> member.) The number of spams I get that I can identify as from
> university faculty machines is zero.
Sure. But the problem was being cast in terms of "IP address provided by
ISP to end user." The point that I'm trying to make is that a better
casting of the problem is in terms of "IP addresses provided without any
clear means of accountability." ISPs are currently forced into providing
trial-period accounts for competition reasons, and those clearly fall into
that category.
I think that "dialups" is the *wrong* statement of the problem. There
exist plenty of dialup pools that are not a spam risk. For example,
consider a large company that has a dialup pool available to contractors
who for whatever reason need direct external connectivity (there *are*
companies that do this; I have worked for one in the past). In order to
have access to it, you have to be employed by the company. This is not a
spam risk. Yet it's a dialup pool.
The right place to be looking here is "do the people managing this range
of IP addresses have sufficient safeguards in place to make spamming not a
problem" not "oh, it looks like a dialup, nuke it." To take another
example, nearly all dialup pools *outside* the United States may have
sufficient safeguards in place. I don't know. But the economics there
are different than they are here.
To take a third example, if you're actually preventing any spam by
blocking Stanford's dialup pool (yes, we run our own), I'd dearly like to
know about it. Feel free to mail me off-list if you've seen anything like
that, provide timestamps, and I'll take it up with our abuse folks and can
provide a much more effective solution to those problems than blocking our
dialups would ever provide.
> I get them on occasion from open University relays that are identifiable
> as mail relay machines.
Yes. Universities have a major relay problem. I'm not excluding us on
that either, although we're *trying* (operative word) to be proactive
about it. Having lots of Unix boxes directly on the Internet is very nice
for some things but causes lots of headaches for others, particularly when
most Unix vendors are still complete idiots about their default MTA
configuration.
> The whole point of people on the other side of this is that I should
> make decisions on my end based on their desires. That's not the way the
> game works.
No, my point is that I like communicating with other people. This is the
whole reason why I use the Internet. But there is a level beyond which I
am unwilling to go to communicate with someone. I by and large will not
waste my time undoing spam-blocked addresses, for example. So I tend to
jump into conversations where it seems to me like people are heading down
paths that may result in they and I no longer being able to communicate
with each other.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
