Outgoing SMTP Servers

Brian Johnson bjohnson at drtel.com
Mon Oct 31 03:36:50 UTC 2011


On Oct 30, 2011, at 2:19 PM, Dave CROCKER wrote:

<snip ridiculousness>

> 
> Email travels over shared resources.  Spam consumes roughly %95 percent of that shared path (comm lines and servers).  Receiving operators must devote masses of resources to filter that firehose of mostly junk, in order to get everyone's mailboxes to remain at least somewhat useful. Since the spammers are well-organized and aggressive and often quite bright, they adapt their attacks to get round these filters, thereby creating an extremely unstable arms race. This means the entire situation is extremely unstable.  When -- not if -- it breaks, mail becomes unusable.  That will be a common suffering.
> 
> The one-to-one cost or damage is probably also a reasonable perspective, but it's /incremental/ to the shared cost.
> 
> d/
> -- 
> 
>  Dave Crocker
>  Brandenburg InternetWorking
>  bbiw.net
> 


So you support filtering end-user outbound SMTP sessions as this is a means to prevent misuse of the Commons*. Correct?

 - Brian

* I do not think of the Internet as a commons, but Dave does. I will not comment on this as it is tangential to the thread.



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