open relays at Earthlink

Fri Aug 21 18:42:47 UTC 1998

>We support all of those mail-sending methods and because of that we have
>not relayed one single message for a non-customer in the life of our
>service.

Maybe in part because your customers are remarkably endowed with clueons.
In my abundant experience supporting configuration changes on the part of
dial-up users (like Mindspring's), I have found that your average dial-up
user is about as capable of reconfiguring and upgrading software as you or
I am of building a nuclear reactor with a pencil, some sand, and a stick of
bubble gum.

Imposing security measures or performance enhancement tricks after initial
implementation is a huge imposition on any company's technical support
staff, and frequently serves more as a customer irritant than anything
else.  I remember having to assist flash.net customers with reconfigurating
their POP3 and SMTP clients when that provider went to a round-robin
load-balancing mail server system.  It was ... painful.

ag