EFF whitepaper

Mon Nov 15 21:06:09 UTC 2004

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Steven Champeon wrote:
> John Gilmore runs a well-known open relay at toad.com, and for some
> reason thinks that free, anonymous speech is important enough to let
> spammers drown it out through sheer volume.

Someone famous said something about paying a high price for free speech, I
think this perhaps would fall under that category.

Mr Gilmore spends quite a bit of time tending to his mail server to ensure
that spammers do not abuse it. Any spammer who spends time pumping mail
through his server is going to realize quite quickly that its not worth
their time. Its a very old slow machine on a T1 with other intentional
slowdowns added to the MTA, and some amount of spam filtering. I would say
it would have a hard time passing more than 1 message a minute.

I would think that most spammers would give up and go abuse an open proxy
somewhere, they're much more plentiful and less cluefully tended.