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Neither email nor spam filtering nor any other kind of filtering should be the job of an ISP. An ISP should be a big, dumb bit pipe, nothing more, nothing less.
by cynwoody 15y ago
Neither email nor spam filtering nor any other kind of filtering should be the job of an ISP. An ISP should be a big, dumb bit pipe, nothing more, nothing less.
- jrockway 15y agoThat's one way of looking at it, but email without spam filtering is largely useless. There's just too much of it. Similarly, ISPs filter all sorts of other stuff: forged packets, bogus routes, and so on. The Internet simply would not work without ISP-level filtering. Dumb pipes get clogged too easily.
- cynwoody 15y agoThat's why I use GMail. Its spam filtering is top-notch. I use Verizon FiOS for internet. It works pretty well. But no way do I want Verizon doing my email. I view it as a conflict of interest. It pisses me off that they also provide TV and continually try to upsell me to it. I'd much rather the whole bandwidth of the fiber be devoted to internet and none to TV. I don't have a problem with the low-level filtering you mention. That just makes the pipe work better. But I do have a problem with ISPs wanting to morph into more that.
- nknight 15y agoIf your ISP offers you email service and you take advantage of it, you aren't asking it to just be a big dumb pipe. ISPs do nothing of the sort when you get your email through third-party providers like gmail, which people obviously do not want to just be a big dumb pipe, since the entire purpose of using gmail is as a email service. Put another way: The person you're replying to was using the term "ISP" loosely, and you're using it very narrowly. There was a time when your ISP was almost always your email provider, and third-party services and self-hosting were extremely rare.