Fun new policy at AOL

Thu Aug 28 18:07:45 UTC 2003

>> Shouldn't customers that purchase IP services from an ISP use the ISPs
>> mail server as a smart host for outbound mail?
>
> Shouldn't. There are privacy implications of having mail to be recorded
> (even temporarily) at someone's disk drive.
>

If your ISP violates your privacy or has a privacy policy you don't 
like, find another one.
If your ISP doesn't allow your domain through, attachments of a certain 
size or quantity of RCPT TOs, find another one.
If the ISP is too restrictive you can't do what you want, find another 
one
If the ISP isn't restrictive and your IP gets black holed because of 
another customer, find another one.
The market will decide what is acceptable.

I filter a chunk of stuff for my users.  It is a service to help 
protect them as well as me.  If they ask for and appear to have a clue 
I will remove filters for customers.  I'll never force them to do it 
'my way or the highway' but by default customers are filtered.  99% of 
them are happy that I am doing it and think it is a good thing.  1% 
call and I remove the filters.  Simple RADIUS update and they are back 
to full, unfiltered Internet.  I do this on all my dialup, DSL, 
dedicated circuits.  Everything is built from either LDAP or RADIUS 
(which comes from LDAP anyway) information about the customer.  Pull 
down menu to select/deselect a filter and reconnect.  It isn't all that 
hard and for 99% of my customers I am saving myself a ton of work in 
the long run.

I'm not huge by any stretch of the imagination but I'm pretty good 
sized for my area.  I think my current network design/management could 
easily scale to the 100's of thousands and/or millions of customers.  
I'm in the 10's of thousands now.

-Matt