Well, Comcast just blocked port 25 at my house and required to use port 587 for outgoing mail. I guess charging money per email is next?
port 25 is dead dropped to my non-comcast server as well. Also comcast rep writes: I have included the current list of blocked ports for you below:
67 68 135 137 138 139 445 512 520 1080
Al
----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> To: "Bernie Cosell" <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> Cc: <mailman-users@python.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 8:29 PM Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] The economics of spam
Bernie Cosell writes:
I'm not sure these are fatal-flaw problems
They're not.
[same as with the USPS
Aye, there's the rub. The USPS is, even today, a state(-protected) monopoly. Email is not, and cannot be, unless you make the whole Internet a state monopoly.
... Email has evolved more along the lines of the TCP/IP packet paradigm rather than that associated with postal hard-copy snail-mail. There are aspects of email that resemble ICMP packets far more than they resemble Christmas cards.
Why, Lindsay, I'm shocked. I thought you didn't know the jargon!<wink>
Actually, this is backwards. email *started* that way [remember that forwarding was provided for and there was even that cute explicit-routing form of email address] and has, IMO, evolved off into needing to be *more*like* Christmas cards.
Including a national monopoly email provider, I guess? What I interpret Lindsay to be saying is that for Christmas cards you can treat the USPS as a well-behaved black box (in the systems analysis sense; it may or may not do the job it claims to do at all well, but you can figure out what job it reliably does). In particular you can determine that a piece of mail was properly paid for by the addressee because each and every one has postage *attached*, not merely "accounted for" somewhere. This is not true for ICMP or for email as currently designed; there is no way to determine the provenance of a packet in general.
Sure, you can redesign email to require a secure, authenticated connection. But that's not the current design. Nor will a secure, authenticated connection that carries postage be acceptable in the market. Price competition will quickly drive postage actually paid to zero, and all that will happen is that the email network will become disconnected (as we are currently observing, anyway): a "backbone cabal" of email providers will evolve, and people with Linux boxes etc will set up wildcat SMTP networks along the lines of the old UUCP network.
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