4 ms·

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/

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!
autoexec 5y ago
> [citation needed] Nearly 85% of all emails are spam. source: https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ At times that number has been even higher with over 90% of all messages sent over the internet being spam. If 90% of all the messages in your inbox were spam how long would you continue to use it? Email systems can't bear the costs that spam forces on them. Even with tools like blacklisting which you think shouldn't exist that cost is measured in tens of billions annually. source: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.26.3.87 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.26.3.87 If not for the ability to filter common sources of spam, email would never have survived as a viable means of communication. > It's way more than 0.001%. Like, several orders of magnitude more. Whatever the actual number, it's clearly acceptable to us because blocking irresponsible networks is standard practice. We depend on it. > What overwhelming amounts of spa Again, 80-90% of all mail is spam, costing billions. If you're able to run a mail system without blacklists that's great for you, but it clearly doesn't work for everyone. > You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else. That's the beauty of the internet. I don't have the power to force an abusive network to do their job and prevent spam from leaving their network and that abusive network can't force me to accept mail from them. No one can force anyone to do anything. All we have is a loose set of standards and expectations and it's up to each network to decide what to accept or not based on how well those standards and expectations are followed. > 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. A responsible ISP identifies those users and prevents them continuing to cause problems. If they refuse to do that their reputation suffers and they will get blocked. If they do their job too slowly or too poorly they will be blocked. Is it possible for a responsible ISP to end up on blacklists? Yes, it is, and there are blacklists that don't maintain their lists well. That's fine too because no one is forced to use them. It's still the case that every network has the choice of what blacklists they will or won't use and how they use them. They can whitelist blacklisted IPs they decide to trust and they can use blacklists to greylist instead of block. > The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs just for being ISPs Nope. Even small very ISPs can staff their internet abuse departments adequately and implement anti-spam technologies to prevent their IP space from becoming a safe haven for hackers and spammers. If they choose not to do that they will and should be blocked. > 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. I'll agree that there are problems when certain services (either cloud providers or mail providers like Gmail) become "too big to blacklist". We've had that problem with AOL and we have it now with Google. Personally, I'd prefer to hold them to the same standards as everyone else, but the problem of the largest players throwing their weight around giving them unfair advantages exists in every industry and until someone comes up with a solution for it, we're all just stuck playing along. > Block actual spam sources If your ISP is a safe haven for spammers and hackers their IP space is the spam source. > provide a reasonable method for removing blocks that are no longer necessary. So your alternative to blacklists is just more blacklists that are run better? I think everyone who depends on blacklists would like those blacklists to be better at detecting spam sources and better at clearing unnecessary listings. The good news is that badly run blacklists don't tend to get widely adopted because they cause more trouble for ISPs than they are worth. If some network won't accept your mail and you're convinced that your ISP is acting responsibility and that it's the blacklist that's wrong, you can have the person you're trying to reach contact their ISP to get your mail server whitelisted. If an ISP sees that a blacklist they use is catching too many messages that it shouldn't they'll adjust their thresholds or stop using that list. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best one we have.

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!

autoexec 5y ago

> [citation needed] Nearly 85% of all emails are spam. source: https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ At times that number has been even higher with over 90% of all messages sent over the internet being spam. If 90% of all the messages in your inbox were spam how long would you continue to use it? Email systems can't bear the costs that spam forces on them. Even with tools like blacklisting which you think shouldn't exist that cost is measured in tens of billions annually. source: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.26.3.87 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.26.3.87 If not for the ability to filter common sources of spam, email would never have survived as a viable means of communication. > It's way more than 0.001%. Like, several orders of magnitude more. Whatever the actual number, it's clearly acceptable to us because blocking irresponsible networks is standard practice. We depend on it. > What overwhelming amounts of spa Again, 80-90% of all mail is spam, costing billions. If you're able to run a mail system without blacklists that's great for you, but it clearly doesn't work for everyone. > You don't get to decide what's acceptable to everyone else. That's the beauty of the internet. I don't have the power to force an abusive network to do their job and prevent spam from leaving their network and that abusive network can't force me to accept mail from them. No one can force anyone to do anything. All we have is a loose set of standards and expectations and it's up to each network to decide what to accept or not based on how well those standards and expectations are followed. > 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. A responsible ISP identifies those users and prevents them continuing to cause problems. If they refuse to do that their reputation suffers and they will get blocked. If they do their job too slowly or too poorly they will be blocked. Is it possible for a responsible ISP to end up on blacklists? Yes, it is, and there are blacklists that don't maintain their lists well. That's fine too because no one is forced to use them. It's still the case that every network has the choice of what blacklists they will or won't use and how they use them. They can whitelist blacklisted IPs they decide to trust and they can use blacklists to greylist instead of block. > The kind of policy you advocate punishes small ISPs just for being ISPs Nope. Even small very ISPs can staff their internet abuse departments adequately and implement anti-spam technologies to prevent their IP space from becoming a safe haven for hackers and spammers. If they choose not to do that they will and should be blocked. > 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. I'll agree that there are problems when certain services (either cloud providers or mail providers like Gmail) become "too big to blacklist". We've had that problem with AOL and we have it now with Google. Personally, I'd prefer to hold them to the same standards as everyone else, but the problem of the largest players throwing their weight around giving them unfair advantages exists in every industry and until someone comes up with a solution for it, we're all just stuck playing along. > Block actual spam sources If your ISP is a safe haven for spammers and hackers their IP space is the spam source. > provide a reasonable method for removing blocks that are no longer necessary. So your alternative to blacklists is just more blacklists that are run better? I think everyone who depends on blacklists would like those blacklists to be better at detecting spam sources and better at clearing unnecessary listings. The good news is that badly run blacklists don't tend to get widely adopted because they cause more trouble for ISPs than they are worth. If some network won't accept your mail and you're convinced that your ISP is acting responsibility and that it's the blacklist that's wrong, you can have the person you're trying to reach contact their ISP to get your mail server whitelisted. If an ISP sees that a blacklist they use is catching too many messages that it shouldn't they'll adjust their thresholds or stop using that list. It's not a perfect system, but it's the best one we have.