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spambayes rocks

Donn Cave donn at u.washington.edu
Thu Jan 30 13:32:22 EST 2003 
Quoth "Brett g Porter" <BgPorter at NOartlogicSPAM.com>:
| "Donn Cave" <donn at u.washington.edu> wrote in message
| news:b1bnl2$181k$1 at nntp6.u.washington.edu...
|> Quoth "Brett g Porter" <BgPorter at NOartlogicSPAM.com>:
|> ...
|> | Of course, DNS-based blacklists shoot an elephant gun at the problem, and
|>| it's just too bad if you happen to innocently be using an ISP who gets
|>| flagged as a source of spam. Every few months this happens to us, and after
|>| we see messages being bounced, we call the ISP, and they boot the  spammer,
|>| and eventually the domain gets removed from the blacklist, but by that time
|>| we've lost a few days of business email.
|>|
|>| Blocking all mail (even legitimate) from South Korea  solves one problem,
|>| but creates another -- if my ISP happens to subscribe to this blacklist
|>| service, there's absolutely no way for me to receive email from my family
|>| living there.
|>
|> Then you and your family urgently need to bring this problem to the
|> Korean authorities.  Until they take responsibility for the problem,
|> you will be hostages to one side or the other in an anarchic struggle
|> between ISPs and spammers.
|
| I don't buy that argument for a second. How is it different from (f'r
| instance) my local telco deciding to reject all phone calls from the 818
| area code because there are telemarketers operating from there? It's not the
| responsibility of the legitimate customers to police the illegitimate
| customers just because someone downstream has deputized themself as the spam
| police.
|
| Broad blacklists like this are nothing more than the geek equivalent of a
| playground tantrum.

If only a negligible minority are ever going do it, that's true, but
the other way to look at it is geeks willing to make some of their
own customers unhappy in the interest of progress for everyone.

If the 818 area code harbors telephone users who abuse the rest of the
phone network, and whoever's theoretically responsible for 818 isn't
responsive, I don't think your local telco ought to be obligated to
provide service to them.  If this were just about some irritation to
an occasional phone customer, it would be overkill, but when it gets
to the point where the whole system is seriously compromised by this
abuse, it's just common sense.  We're there with email, and it's just
getting started.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu
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