Re: Networking -- use of two Internet connections for one server with round robin DNS -- web okay, but should I do mail this way too?

[lee <lee@yun.yagibdah.de>]

Joe <joe@jretrading.com> writes:

> To be honest, I wouldn't try to block email from consumers at
> source. It would be easy to do, so I think the ISPs must agree with
> me. If that were to happen, the spammers won't give up and get proper
> jobs, they'll put more effort into compromising networks which are
> still permitted to send mail. Since spam from consumers is so much
> easier to identify, I think we're better off as we are.

Hm.  We might ... unless people would get an IP address assigned for
their internet connection and be held liable for the damage they do with
it.  They do it with cars, phone numbers, social security numbers and
other things as well, so why aren't they doing it with IP addresses?

>> The contention has pretty much been decided already :(  To decide
>> whether to send and to receive mail is not up to the users.  Only the
>> postmasters can do that.
>> 
>> It is not surprising that they are striving hard to keep and to extend
>> their powers, or is it?  Only at first glance, it's somewhat confusing
>> that they admit that 90--95% of all email is SPAM.  Instead of taking
>> such a statement as evidence to support the assumption that their
>> fight is rather futile, one might wonder what actually is on their
>> agenda. Are they Borg?
>> 
>> 
> There is a big advantage in blocking spam at the SMTP level. The body
> of the email never gets transmitted. So that 90-95% are spam sending
> *attempts*, many of which are denied after only a few packets are
> transferred. Allowing them to be sent and then identified and discarded
> from peoples' mailboxes would add a great deal of Internet traffic, and
> there will never be enough bandwidth...

At some point, your internet connection might be flooded with attempts
to send SPAM, and the attempts themselves become a problem.  You cannot
easily somehow block them upstream /before/ they eat up all your
bandwidth.

Perhaps the concept of concentrating the receiving and sending of email
to a relatively small number of mail servers that inevitably have a
relatively large number of users and thus attract a great deal of
attempts to send SPAM needs to be reconsidered.  The irony is that the
attempts of ISPs, postmasters and operators of blacklists, like
Spamhouse, to make it more difficult for everyone to send and to receive
mail are backfiring.  If more people would run their own mail servers on
their own internet connection, they would take more care not to send
SPAM.  It would be more difficult for senders of SPAM to get anyone to
send their SPAM.  There would also be a lot more targets for senders of
SPAM, making it way more difficult for them to actually reach anyone.

People seem to usually use routers with their "residential" internet
connections, and the needed functionality could be built into these
devices.  It could already have become common practise that everyone who
doesn't want to run an MTA on their computer uses their router to send
and receive their email instead of entrusting others with it.  It's even
weird that they are entrusting others with their email, considering the
total lack of security (unless they send encrypted mail exclusively,
which isn't very feasible).

What sense does it make at all to have large mail servers as there are
now?  I take it it's merely something that developed historically
because a few years back, we didn't have the kind of permanent internet
connection we do have now, and mail servers that had a permanent
connection were actually advantageous.  That has changed a lot, and a
lot of people won't need to use someone elses mail server anymore.

Who is actually /fighting/ SPAM?  It seems that everyone is only
concerned with /protecting/ their MTA from it by trying to filter it
out.


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