Spam Control Considered Harmful

Thu Oct 30 05:24:46 UTC 1997

On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, Cal Thixton - President - ThoughtPort Authority of Chicago wrote:

> 	I personally see no practical technical means of eliminating the
> practise of spamming and rather than spending time trying to dream up
> fancier and smarter sendmail's, we should seek to simply expand the
> current mail fraud laws to cover electronic mail.  Then we can simply
> sic the FBI on these people armed with terabytes of logs and spam emails

And what will the FBI do when spammers leave the US and do their deed from
other countries?  Spammers won't be stopped by legislation or
technology...the average internet user can't handle the amount of
technology necessary to keep spam out of their mail.  The average sysadmin
isn't much better off.  I had to disable my latest anti-spam sendmail rule
today (denying incoming mail from sites with no or incorrect in-addr.arpa
DNS) because a client is trying to do business with a site that has
existed for a year an a half and never setup in-addr.arpa DNS.

Spam can only be stopped by responsible providers not allowing their
clients to abuse the net.  Phil's attitude of "We provide internet
connectivity.  If you don't like spam, _you_ do something about it." has
nearly destroyed AGIS.  Who's going to be next?

BTW...Cal...obtain a linefeed.

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