Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 02:54:57PM -0500, Ken Pugh wrote:
> 
> Well, just wait two years and there will be no more spam.

Heh. Yeah, and IPv6 should be fully rolled out by 1998. Gates' proposal
is the insane rambling of a diseased mind.
 
> Be sure to read page two of this article - the quote by Nicholas Graham.

"America Online introduced a new security feature last week that would
make it harder for spammers to hijack an AOL address."

Um, no. They implemented SPF, which - if also adopted by every other
mail server - will make it difficult for spammers to forge aol.com
addresses in the envelope sender. But that doesn't mean much until
everyone else also adopts it. And given that after I block a few hundred
thousand IPs at the network level, reject all mail from hosts with known
"generic" reverse DNS, and reject based on a few dozen other various
sanity checks (like forged or improper HELOs, known spamware signatures,
etc.) I've gotten rid of 95% of my spam load, without SPF, that suggests
that the problem isn't simply an issue of forged senders. Sure, it's
annoying, but SPF only solves a small piece of the puzzle.

Now, if all ISPs would just block outbound port 25 from dynamic hosts,
yeah, the spam would dry up to a slow trickle. But that's not going to
happen, because they have absolutely no impetus to do so.

"It's very popular right now, in fact I'd say it's in vogue to say you
have the largest, greatest cure-all to solve spam forever," said AOL
spokesman Nicholas Graham. "But these are the same people who think
we'll end up living in a world with no taxes and a cure for the common
cold."

That's just funny. Sadly misinformed, too, but funny.

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