trapdoor.merit.edu and other impatient Postfix mailers everywhere (fwd)

John A. Tamplin jat at liveonthenet.com
Thu Aug 2 23:12:10 UTC 2001


On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Mitch Halmu wrote:

> Which is to show you what can happen to those that entrust control of
> their communications to a third party. The commercialization of the lil'
> MAPS charity proves beyond a reasonable doubt that it was just another
> clever ploy for them to make a living at it. The brilliant idea: have
> everybody pay a small toll on email. Blackhole thy opponents. Quote:

Mitch, we are all aware of your stake in this battle.  Personally, I have
been using MAPS on my personal mail server simply because I get maybe one 
spam per week at that address compared to hundreds per day at my old work
email address.  Both addresses are in whois contacts, both have posted to
public lists and to newsgroups, etc.  I see value in that service.  You
don't see value because people like me have decided that they trust
MAPS procedures for putting mail servers on the list and removing them,
and those policies have impacted you.  Yes, I am fully aware that some
people who I might want to receive email from will be bounced, but I 
think that is a reasonable price for the spam reduction.  BTW, I check the
logs periodically and that is about 1 legitimate message per month.

The only problem I have is I didn't see any notification of this change
anywhere until I noticed I wasn't getting any email this morning.  Then
their web server was so overloaded it took a while to find out about the
change.  As it happens, my personal mail server will still be free and
my current employer will be very cheap, so there is no reason not to 
continue.

I understand they have a problem notifying everyone since they don't 
know contact information for the people using the service, but I would
have expected to see an announcement here, for example.

> "There will be a day when folks will need to pay to transit email."
> (Paul Vixie, 1998)
> 
> That day has come.

???  There are no costs related to MAPS for sending email.  The only people
that pay anything to MAPS are those who find value in the service for
filtering incoming email.  If you don't want that service, don't pay for it.

> The inclusion of maps.vix.com references in the sendmail code has lead 
> to predictable consequences. Let's hope this will serve as a warning to
> all sysadmins who can infere what's wrong with enterprises like MAPS 
> from this incident.

How do you think those references got there?  Could it be that enough 
people requested it and asked how to do it with older versions of 
sendmail that it was made an optional part of the standard configuration?

John A. Tamplin					jat at jaet.org
770/436-5387 HOME				4116 Manson Ave
770/431-9459 FAX		 		Smyrna, GA  30082-3723




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