[NCLUG] mmmmmmm...spam control

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 09:48:46AM -0700, William Dan Terry wrote:
>who pays the bill. I draw the line of free speech at someone barging
>into my living room uninvited and then forcing me to pay a bill for
>what he said. This is the biggest problem with spam. Whether you pay a

Worse is that spammers usually use open relays and forged from addresses,
causing *ONE* other entity to get stuck with much of the bill for sending
their message...  And I'm not just talking about the bill for the bandwidth
(which can be substantial for millions of messages passed), but also the
administrative time.

For example, if you use somone else's SMTP server for relaying, their
legitimate mail is probably going to get lost, causing users to complain
and admins to spend hours tracking down the problem and correcting it.
Then you have to deal with all the bounces (which usually come to the
postmaster address on that machine, or go to the owner of the domain that
was forged in the From headers).  *THEN* you have to deal with all the
angry people sending you mail telling you to stop sending them mail.

As somone who's had their domain name forged several times, let me tell you
that it's not fun to wake up on Saturday morning to 5k messages in your
inbox, another 10k bogging down your mail server, and then over the next
few days get a bunch of strangers swearing at you for something you never
did...

I'm just waiting for a Colorado company to make that mistake...

Sean
-- 
 Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
                 -- Seymore Cray, on virtual memory
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python