amazonaws.com?

Tue May 27 17:08:16 UTC 2008

> If the address-space owner won't police it's own property, 
> there is no reason for the rest of the world to spend the 
> time/effort to _selectively_ police it for them.

Exactly!!! 
If an SMTP server operator is not willing to police their server
by implementing a list of approved email partners, then why should
the rest of the Internet have to block outgoing port 25 connections?
The buck needs to stop right where the problem is and that is
on the SMTP servers that are promiscuously allowing almost any
IP address to open an socket with them and inject email messages.

> Amazon _might_ 'get a clue' if enough providers walled off 
> the EC2 space, and they found difficulty selling cycles to 
> people who couldn't access the machines to set up their 
> compute applications.

Amazon might get a clue and sue companies who take such outrageously
extreme action. Even if you are being slammed by millions of email
messaged from Amazon address space, that is not justification for
blocking all access to the space. It's a point problem on your
mail server so leave the shotgun alone, and put an ACL blocking
port 25 access to your mail server.

I don't believe that horrendously broken email architecture and email
operators
with no vision, are sufficient justification for blocking new and
innovative
business models on the Internet. 10 months of the year, Amazon has 10
times as
many servers as they need. They want to rent them out piecemeal and I
applaud
their innovation. Maybe their model is not perfect yet, but the solution
to that
is not to raise a lynch mob. Instead you should build a better cloud
computing 
business and beat them that way.

--Michael Dillon