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more on Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam]
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 15:07:41 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Lee Revell <rlrevell () joe-job com> Date: April 3, 2006 7:01:21 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Cc: ip () v2 listbox com, cbeck () pacanukeha netSubject: Re: [IP] Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam]
(please remove my name) On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 18:13 -0400, David Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: Chris Beck <cbeck () pacanukeha net> Date: April 3, 2006 6:04:12 PM EDT To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: [Fwd: Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam] Hi Dave, I didn't see this fly by on IP - "In late 2004 Verizon implemented a massive blocklist for DSL customers, that seemed to block a ton of email from outside the country -- with no way to get around the list.
What a terrible precedent. No good deed goes unpunished. This kind of thing was commonplace and necessary before spam filtering became sophisticated. When I worked at an ISP I had to block wanadoo.fr once (this generated one complaint out of thousands of users, and blocked thousands of spam mails per day). At one point before I started Russia was briefly blocked (for hacking/bot attacks not spam). Before we bought a dedicated spam filtering appliance our sendmail files contained hundreds of networks and domains, mail from which was bounced with a "Spammers go away" message. Domain based filtering later became ineffective once spammers started buying throwaway domains. You have to understand that when an ISP is under spam attack, it often comes down to a choice between heavy handed blocking, and having the mail servers fall over, at which point remote systems may start to bounce mail or even silently discard it (the volume of spam having made queueing or even bouncing impractical for many hosts). Probably 25 to 50% of tech support resources were already wasted responding to spam complaints from users. It was a very common reason for users to cancel. While false positives are a problem, insufficiently aggressive spam filtering can also cause mail to be lost, as they won't be able to pick the legit mails out of the hundreds of spam messages. In this day and age if an ISP doesn't aggressively filter spam, they soon won't have any users left. I don't quite buy that there was absolutely no way to get around the list. It seems more likely that these users were sending mail from systems or networks that were still spewing spam, and the blocks were not fine grained enough. It makes no sense that Verizon would refuse to de-list an innocent system. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on Verizon Discovers The Cost Of Being Too Aggressive In Blocking Spam] David Farber (Apr 04)