Outgoing SMTP Servers

Fri Oct 28 18:59:31 UTC 2011

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 1:34 AM, Joel jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
> Email as facility is a public good whether it constitutes a commons or
> not... If wasn't you wouldn't bother putting up a server that would
> accept unsolicited incoming connections on behalf of yourself and
> others, doing so is generically non-rival and non-excludable although
> not perfectly so in either case (what public good is).

Interesting. I want to abstract and restate what I think you just said
and ask you to correct my understanding:

Making a service accessible to the public via the Internet implicitly
grants some basic permission to that public to make use of the
service, permission which can not be revoked solely by saying so.

If that's the case, what is the common denominator? What is the
standard of permission automatically granted by placing an email
server on the internet, from which a particular operator may grant
more permission but may not reasonably grant less? Put another way,
what's the whitelist of activities for which we generally expect our
vendor to ignore complaints, what's the blacklist of activities for
which a vendor who fails to adequately redress complaints is
misbehaving and what's left in the gray zone where behavior might be
abusive but is not automatically so?

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004