On 7/16/02 4:44 PM, "John W Baxter" <jwblist@olympus.net> wrote:
I don't think the ISPs *can* solve the problem in the near-to-medium-term future. [Longer term, with the demise of SMTP and its "everything open to all except for a few bandaids" approach, maybe.]
Me, I'm just not that worried about this idea, any more than I worry about the 'we simply need to redo e-mail so you pay to send things' -- because any NEW system is going to have to be backwards compatible with the old system for a significant period of time, iether directly or through some kind of gateway system -- so there's a good period of time for the lot of us to find ways of dealing with it. And don't forget, even the big ISPs use off the shelf tools like sendmail, postfix, etc. if they really want to build customized systems, it'll be really tough (and expensive) to do so without the tools they bring in from the open source community, and as big as any of the ISPs are, whatever protocols they create will have to be open at some level, because while MSN is huge and AOL is huge, if AOL can't talk to MSN and MSN can't talk to AOL, the protocol will fail.
And whatever protocol they build, open source can build something that works with it. If they can reverse engineer samba, I'm not worried about e-mail protocols. And given that most of the big boys build their systems (increasingly) on linux and use open source extensively, I think the "big boys will lock us all out" is a strawman. Which doesn't mean I don't think we should not be vigilant, but...
At some point, the SpamAssassin/quarantine model breaks down...
Yeah. When you're on deadline, and the admin is on vacation.
As it is, we're busily installing four machines to do the work that one would do quite well in the absence of spammers (and they'll have help from another machine or two so that users can see their quarantined mail and rescue their false positives). And yes, SpamAssassin is part of that picture.
Yup. That setup is fairly typical for high volume email systems these days. But a number of the big e-mail systems who's admins I talk to are seeing as much as 30% of the email being sent to the system rejected as spam, and the numbers are growing.
-- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/
The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet: And they all died happily ever after