E-Mail authentication fight looming: Microsoft pushing Sender ID

Sun Jul 10 02:09:03 UTC 2005

On 09/07/05, Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 6 Jul 2005 trainier at kalsec.com wrote:
> 
> > The second issue with boycotting, is the false positives.
> 
> No, the *point* of the boycott is the "false positives".  ISPs *will* react
> when their general users find themselves unable to send e-mail because the
> entire netspace of the offending ISP is blocked (boycotted).
> 

It depends, of course, on who is doing the spam filtering.

I've seen several people I respect, doing good and sensible filtering
that is as surgical as possible, but remarkably effective given that
this filtering is applied at 800 lb gorilla sites.

I've also seen some people, with root and/or enable on remarkably
large networks, who don't realize that good spam filtering is not just
knowing the syntax for "access list 101 deny" or "vi /etc/mail/access,
then makemap hash access.db < access"., and who I wouldn't trust to be
postmaster at etch-a-sketch, let alone on a production cluster of
mailservers.

Kind of the difference in effect that a fused bundle of dynamite has,
when it is used by

* A trained mining engineer
* Wile E Coyote

Though, to be fair, Wile E affects only himself, and he's back up and
running within seconds even though he's interestingly blackened with
frizzed eyebrows and smoking whiskers.  Dumb spam filtering affects a
whole lot of innocent users, a lot more than a dynamite blast or a
fall off a high cliff into high voltage power lines seems to affect
Wile E.

--srs

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)