FW: The worst abuse e-mail ever, sverige.net

Lars-Johan Liman liman at autonomica.se
Wed Sep 22 08:16:41 UTC 2004


I cannot agree to the "block port 25" line of action.

I am a Unix sysadmin, with 15 years of experience as sendmail and DNS
expert. I have a DSL line at home, with static IP, and generic rDNS
provided by my ISP. Behind it I have a serious Unix server, configured
to roughly the same standard that I use at work.
 
I know enough about this business to not trust my ISP with anything
more than moving packets to and from my server (and even that is
streching it ;-). I don't want to pay for their lousy mail service,
I can do it better myself.

And you don't want to let me?

Now, *why* should *I* be punished because the rest of my neighbours
have chosen to jump into the commercial bed of an operating system
that is a walking invitation to cracking?

The Internet is designed to be end-to-end.

I know of ISPs that try to filter out IP telephony to force the users
to use and pay for the ISP's VOIP service. Is that OK?  No, I thought
not. But remember - when VOIP gets deployed really wide and far (like
e-mail today), you'll start to receive a lot more abusive phone
calls. Why?

This all boils down to cost and cost model. In the real world, the
sender pays for the (paper) mail message. In the electronic world,
the bigger cost is carried by the recipient. This model will break in
the future.

It's too d---ned cheap to send out spam, and it'll be too d---ned
cheap to sell your stuff over VOIP in the future.

We could fight all this, but it takes manpower and competence, and
manpower and competence cost real money - money that the customer is
not willing to spend ... yet.

This is a market problem. It will eventually sort itself out, but
stopping serious and sesnsible people from using the Internet as it is
designed, is not the right way to do it. If the Internet is going to
survive - the cost model has to change. Or, there's another future,
where the Internet as we know it, is just a packet transport system,
on which we build our own (several) virtual networks which are only
reachable by the community (-ies) that we choose. Configuration
nightmare. But someone will make money by providing software tools to
help us make our worlds as complex as possible (see "NAT" in your
dictionary ...)

(Hmm. Maybe I should start a BGP feed that blacklists all ISPs that
block port 25? Hmm. Hmm. Any takers? :-)

				Cheers,
				  /Liman
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# Lars-Johan Liman, M.Sc.	! E-mail: liman at autonomica.se
# Senior Systems Specialist     ! HTTP  : //www.autonomica.se/
# Autonomica AB, Stockholm 	! Voice : +46 8 - 615 85 72
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