19 ms·

That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that m

That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures. It hurts the innocent and often fails to achieve its original goal anyway.

denton-scratch 5y ago
> and it's your fault Or maybe your policy? > There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures Rejecting email submissions isn't punishment, collective or otherwise. It's something you have to do if you run a mailserver. In the same way, I'm not punishing trespassers if I secure my front-door with a deadlock.
- smaudet 5y ago
  No, but if you secure a cellar with a padlock on hundreds of people, thats called kidnapping and possibly murder.
autoexec 5y ago
> That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. It's how the internet stays functional. If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. Bad actors have been ostracized from communities for as long communities have existed. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. Blacklists have enabled the internet and email to remain useful for most users most of the time. Without them, email wouldn't be usable. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  It's how the internet stays functional. [citation needed] If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. 1. It's way more than 0.001%. Like, several orders of magnitude more. 2. What overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks? Those of us using traditional mail systems with traditional spam filtering seem to be doing OK not getting overwhelmed by incoming spam without the kind of "help" you advocate. 3. You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else. Except that apparently you've decided you do, which is why regulation is needed to remove that ability from service providers who can't do their jobs properly and hurt others as a result. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. This is a poor argument. Any ISP that accepts significant numbers of customers will occasionally have a customer who is either malicious or operating with imperfect security allowing someone else who is malicious to exploit them. The decent ones will identify the problem and block it reasonably quickly, but there is plenty of evidence that they can still be blacklisted and it can still be difficult or impossible to get removed from those blacklists again after the problem is fixed. The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs just for being ISPs. I invite you to apply the same policy fairly and neutrally to larger organisations such as the major mail forwarding services and cloud hosts as well and see how long you survive in this industry. Or maybe the rest of us should apply the same policy to organisations that do what you advocate. If they won't deliver mail reliably, we won't forward any mail to them at all, so their mail service becomes useless. Except of course it's some of the biggest mail services that do this, so just like no-one's going to block incoming mail from AWS or MailChimp, no-one's going to block outgoing mail to Google or Microsoft. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it. Block actual spam sources and provide a reasonable method for removing blocks that are no longer necessary. Don't carpet bomb whole chunks of the Internet just because there are a few bad actors around. Don't fire and forget. It's really not difficult and plenty of small organisations operate just fine on this basis every day.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > What overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks? The majority of all email has been spam, for more than a decade. > You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else If you operate a mailserver, you do actually get to decide what kind of stuff you are willing to accept, and from who. "Everybody else" does not get an automatic right to inject data into my computer. > The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs Not at all (perhaps you meant MSPs?) Blocklisting Google was a reasonable policy, at one time. Blocklisting MailChimp is perfectly reasonable now. > Block actual spam sources Of course, good plan. Unless the sender's ISP is in the habit of moving spammers from one address to another, so they can evade blocks. Then you have to block the ISP, or eat their spam. Postmasters can't inspect every inbound spam!

denton-scratch 5y ago

> and it's your fault Or maybe your policy? > There is a reason that collective punishment is considered immoral by civilised cultures Rejecting email submissions isn't punishment, collective or otherwise. It's something you have to do if you run a mailserver. In the same way, I'm not punishing trespassers if I secure my front-door with a deadlock.

smaudet 5y ago
No, but if you secure a cellar with a padlock on hundreds of people, thats called kidnapping and possibly murder.

autoexec 5y ago

> That seems a lot of rationalisation for a situation where a genuine sender on another system sends legitimate mail to a genuine recipient on your system, that mail is not properly delivered, and it's your fault. It's how the internet stays functional. If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. Bad actors have been ostracized from communities for as long communities have existed. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. Blacklists have enabled the internet and email to remain useful for most users most of the time. Without them, email wouldn't be usable. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it.

Silhouette 5y ago
It's how the internet stays functional. [citation needed] If 0.001% of legitimate mail has to go undelivered in order to prevent overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks from an irresponsible network that's an acceptable loss to most people in our civilized culture. 1. It's way more than 0.001%. Like, several orders of magnitude more. 2. What overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks? Those of us using traditional mail systems with traditional spam filtering seem to be doing OK not getting overwhelmed by incoming spam without the kind of "help" you advocate. 3. You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else. Except that apparently you've decided you do, which is why regulation is needed to remove that ability from service providers who can't do their jobs properly and hurt others as a result. If you want reliable service, choose a responsible ISP. This is a poor argument. Any ISP that accepts significant numbers of customers will occasionally have a customer who is either malicious or operating with imperfect security allowing someone else who is malicious to exploit them. The decent ones will identify the problem and block it reasonably quickly, but there is plenty of evidence that they can still be blacklisted and it can still be difficult or impossible to get removed from those blacklists again after the problem is fixed. The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs just for being ISPs. I invite you to apply the same policy fairly and neutrally to larger organisations such as the major mail forwarding services and cloud hosts as well and see how long you survive in this industry. Or maybe the rest of us should apply the same policy to organisations that do what you advocate. If they won't deliver mail reliably, we won't forward any mail to them at all, so their mail service becomes useless. Except of course it's some of the biggest mail services that do this, so just like no-one's going to block incoming mail from AWS or MailChimp, no-one's going to block outgoing mail to Google or Microsoft. If you have a better solution for spam, the whole world would love to hear it. Block actual spam sources and provide a reasonable method for removing blocks that are no longer necessary. Don't carpet bomb whole chunks of the Internet just because there are a few bad actors around. Don't fire and forget. It's really not difficult and plenty of small organisations operate just fine on this basis every day.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > What overwhelming amounts of spam/attacks? The majority of all email has been spam, for more than a decade. > You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else If you operate a mailserver, you do actually get to decide what kind of stuff you are willing to accept, and from who. "Everybody else" does not get an automatic right to inject data into my computer. > The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs Not at all (perhaps you meant MSPs?) Blocklisting Google was a reasonable policy, at one time. Blocklisting MailChimp is perfectly reasonable now. > Block actual spam sources Of course, good plan. Unless the sender's ISP is in the habit of moving spammers from one address to another, so they can evade blocks. Then you have to block the ISP, or eat their spam. Postmasters can't inspect every inbound spam!