Re: Internet Email Services Association ( wasRE: Why do so few mail providers support Port 587?)

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

[ This discussion should be moved to Spam-L. ]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 10:35:53AM +0000, Michael.Dillon () radianz com wrote:
> You misunderstand me. I believe *LESS* red tape will mean
> better service. Today, an email operator has to deal with
> numerous blacklisting and spam-hunting groups, many of which
> act in secret and none of which have any accountability, either
> to email operators, email users or the public.

Nonsense.  Those groups are accountable to those who choose to avail
themselves of their work.  Mail system operators -- as they have already
demonstrated by their actions -- will not use those resources which are
run incompetently or which do not provide satisfactory results.  And the
wide range of resources available (there are probably about 500 DNSBLs
at the moment) and the variety of policies by which they're run provides
healthy competition as well as a selection of tools sufficient to allow
just about any local policy to be implemented.

There is no need for these operators of these resources (say, SPEWS)
to be accountable to anyone else.  Why should they be?  They merely
publish a list.  If you don't like their list or the policies they
use to build it: don't use it.  But know that everyone else will make
their choices according to their own needs, not yours.

> I'd like to see all of this inscrutable red tape swept aside
> with a single open and public organization that I have been
> calling the Internet Mail Services Association. This will mean
> less red tape, more transparency, and more accountability.

It will also mean that anyone with deep enough pockets to buy their
way in will get a pass to spam as much as they want.  Sorry, but
this experiment has already been run (see "bonded spammer") and
has been a miserable failure.

Besides, there is no "inscrutable red tape".  Dealing with DNSBLs
is quite easy.  Of course, you may not get the results *you* wish to
have, but if you're running or occupying a spammer-infested network,
then the results *you* wish to have are unimportant.

---Rsk