Re: Comcast plays the heavy with email providers in the spam wars

["A. Murphy" <amurph () spamhaus org>]

"Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com> wrote on Tue, 31 Oct 2006
15:26:37 -0500:

> Any opinions on this move by Comcast against POBox.com? 

Bravo, Comcast, for this move against spam. Sad that it took this long for
POBox to stop relaying it, and also sad -- but totally predictable -- that
POBox customers can't figure out that asking POBox to forward them spam is
not a good reason to complain about receiving spam from POBox. 

> Have any other
> email providers or ISPs been hit with this same ultimatum by Comcast? 

I'd have to guess that just about any place that's sending spam to Comcast
has similar blocking issues. Ditto, sending spam to most ISPs.

> Are
> other ISPs also trying to play the heavy against smaller email proviers?

I recall AOL sounding the end to open relays c. 2003, so yes, there are
so-called 800 pound gorillas in the forest. But spinning this as "playing
the heavy against smaller email providers" ignores several years of
discussion in which both Comcast and POBox have been active (and valuable)
contributors, among others. IOW, POBox saw (or should have seen) this
coming and Comcast are not alone nor singling out POBox in their refusal
to accept spam.

> I also don't see how this change cuts down on spam messages going to Comcast
> customers. 

It cuts down on spam delivered by pobox.com which must be processed by and
stored on Comcast servers. It also cuts down on complaints  -- hence
customer support -- by Comcast users who end up with spam in their
mailbox.

> It does however, block spam messages which originate on spam-bot
> infected PCs belonging to Comcast customers.

Yup, among a whole lot of other messy broadband end-user hosts. BTW,
Comcast is moving ahead with fixes to that, not fast enough for my likes,
but faster than many.

> If I were a pobox.com customer, I would wonder about their anti-spam
> filters. 

I would try them and if they didn't work well, I'd try something else.
POBox is pretty smart about e-mail, so my guess is that their filters
probably work pretty well.

> I hate to miss a legit email message because it was considered
> spam.  I run the built-in Outlook anti-spam software and it requires a bit
> of fiddling to get all the options set correctly to avoid loosing real
> messages.

*Any* and *all* spam filters *will* incorrectly identify a message
eventually. If you can't risk losing a single message to filters, then
turn off all filters. Of course, you'll then lose real messages to the
flood of spam. SMTP never has been and never will be a fail-safe delivery
protocol. It still works pretty well with some reasonably good filters
applied, although spam loads lately are dangerously high for many
recievers.

-- 
Alan Murphy
Spamhaus Project Team
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