Re: stag-digests, Krusty Problems

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

At 10:47 PM 12/28/97 -0700, Glenn A. Merrell wrote:
>Richard Welty wrote:
>  All the ISP's provide relay capibility for e-mail.

no, actually, they don't. most restrict relay to IP addresses within their
own networks. netcom is the only major which has completely uncontrolled
relay at this time. i do a lot of mail transport as part of my day job, and
there are ways of controlling relay even at a major ISP; netcom just doesn't
want to bother, which is the main reason why the crew at vix.com added them
to the RBL

>  It is
>impractical to believe that filtering out major ISP's will solve the
>problem in the long run.

i agree; we need legislation. however, being on the RBL has already started
altering netcom's behavior, although it hasn't corrected the problem yet.

>	I know that the SPAMMING problem is huge, and it is particurarly bad
>with AOL, which is my other account.  AOL, who also now owns Compuserve,
>pays a lot of lip service to "eliminating" SPAM, but I still get 20-100
>junk e-mails a day in my AOL account.  I have over 2000 addresses in my
>block e-mail list, and they still get through.  I have been advocating
>AOL changes for almost two years now on how they handle unsolicited
>e-mail.  AOL itself admits it is a huge problem.

i know one of AOL's abuse staff; they are doing the best that they can under
difficult circumstances. stopping incoming spam is very difficult; it's a
problem that i wrestle with myself every day. the problem is made harder
when a major ISP like netcom chooses not to take steps to prevent
unauthorized relay off of their servers.

>  Sometimes the relay
>thread of ISP relays is two or three pages long on AOL, with Netcom, I
>get maybe one SPAM a day.  The worst yet is MSN.com.

there is an issue of appearances here; i'm worried about drive by spam with
netcom origins; you're thinking about where spam arrives, which is a
different matter.

>Q.  Is there any way you can not filter out main ISP's and still provide
>the quality service you have now?

i can leave things the way they currently are. i'd like to use the RBL; it
would save me a lot of work identifying spam domains and spam ip blocks and
listing them myself, and because the RBL is nearly real time, it often cuts
off spams in progress.

>Q.  Are there any solutions that digest subscribers can contribute  to
>the digest if they are on the RBL (without cancelling possibly the only
>account that provides them a local dial-up)

i'm not sure that it's impossible to find alternatives to netcom in the US;
mindspring is very good, for example, and earthlink has been a problem ISP
in the past but has done a lot towards cleaning up their act (earthlink's US
based server network is pretty clean now, and i gather they're starting to
clean up the mess in their european servers). the att worldnet abuse desk
has been very responsive too, so i don't think that finding a non-netcom ISP
that works ok is all that hard.

>Q.  Are there solutions to the problem for those being cut off?

i'm pondering some of those; there are some RBL features that might let me
make an exception for netcom, but i don't have a full grasp of how to
implement such exceptions yet. it depends on some subtleties in domain name
service.

richard
-- 
Richard Welty                                             518-783-9003 (days)
rwelty@domain.elided              http://www.krusty-motorsports.com/
welty@domain.elided (<== real job)        http://www.inet-solutions.net/