Spam Control Considered Harmful

Matt Ryan matt at planet.net.uk
Thu Oct 30 10:17:38 UTC 1997


> 
> Very simple, really. There's absolutely no reason to bring "fair play"
> into the picture when one is dealing with a band of howling jackals,
> and that's all spammers are; the graffitti spray-painters of the net.
>

I think that this sums up the problem with the over-reaction to spam. Their
appears to be a missionary zeal applied to this problem that is OTT when
compared to (my experience of) the problem. We get spam, so do our customers,
but it's a couple of messages, each of ~500 bytes. Even on modems connections
this takes little time to download. And if you put in place customer
modifiable spam filters on your mailservers, then they need not even download
any messages.

If people are having trouble with their mailservers dying under the spammers
attack(!) then I would suggest they need a more scalable system.


Matt.
 
--
Matt Ryan - Network Engineer                    matt at planet.net.uk
Planet OnLine Ltd, The White House,             Tel: +44 113 2345566
Melbourne Street, Leeds, LS2 7PS, UK            Fax: +44 113 2240003






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