>Tiago, this discussion is tiresome. Your precious dialups are going
>to be blocked if they are used to spam, period. It's a done deal; get
>used to it. Accept that it is going to happen, and adjust your
>expectations.
"This discussion is tiresome" is one heck of an understatement.
I don't really mind seeing spam-related discussions on the qmail
mailing list, because I'm something of a newbie here and find the
issues rather interesting. (And I might decide to initiate anti-spam
measures for my new email address at some point soon.)
But it gets *really* ridiculous when knowledgeable people say "people
everywhere will avoid you if you dress like a thug" (the rough
equivalent of blocking likely spam sources based on their "appearance")
and so many of the responses range from "hey, some of us aren't thugs,
but we have a right to dress however we want, and insist you all treat
us exactly the same" to "well, I'll fix *them*, I'm not a thug, but from
now on I'm going to dress like one" to "I'm going to teach *all* the
youngsters, including the thugs, in my neighborhood to dress in fine
clothes, just to make your thug-detection algorithm less useful".
*None* of those responses are useful. None of them, if implemented,
makes the Internet a better place to be. They are, however, exactly
the sort of responses rebellious adolescent children give their parents
when they get advice that offends their delicate egos, advice like "when
you go on an interview for a job involving trust, don't dress like a
thug".
Russ et al are, for the most part, simply trying to *educate* about
how the Internet is responding (sometimes just reacting) to the mountains
of spam, which, as I've said before (elsewhere), are the barnacles on
the ships of Internet commerce.
If you don't agree with this response, please stop complaining about it
*here*. Take it up with the rest of the Internet, e.g. all those sites
(which I haven't looked at much myself) that are actually recommending
and implementing the anti-spam measures you claim you detest, or at
least should not be applied to you (somehow distinguishing you from the
other 5 billion people on the planet, even though you'll take no steps
to offer trustworthy validation of your identity for your outgoing
email).
(If you disagree with the contention that the anti-spam measures
being discussed are being widely implemented, that itself would
be a reasonable topic here, in context. But that doesn't seem to
be an issue in these discussions.)
It all boils down to trust. If you aren't willing to take the steps
necessary to show that you trust the 'net to reliably know who you are
and how to reach you (perhaps through a mutually trusted agent, like
an ISP with a properly administered SMTP), you have *no* right to
expect that you yourself *will* be trusted by default.
Yes, I know it isn't fair that your various setups make it hard for
you to do what you want and present yourself as trustworthy at the
same time.
That's not the problem of the people populating this list, though,
is it?
I think they've already gone well beyond the call of duty by recommending
*several* viable alternatives. Why those recommendations appear to go
completely ignored, I assume is due to the preference of some to
complain rather than adapt.
The issues on *this* list should, I would think, mainly center around
how to implement the various anti-spam tactics and strategies when
qmail and qmail-related technologies are involved.
Whether these strategies themselves are socially acceptable is not
really worthy of so much discussion. Thank goodness the egcs mailing
lists, for example, are not populated with people who constantly claim
that people shouldn't be using C, Fortran, C++, x86 floating-point
arithmetic, or whatever is someone's pet peeve. (And I say this as
someone with a *whole* lot of pet peeves. :)
tq vm, (burley)
