hiding e-mail adresses needed badly

[Peter Jeremy]

[This may get duplicated if my outgoing work e-mail gets fixed]

On 2003-Oct-16 11:29:36 -0700, Terry Lambert <tlambert2 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>Earthlink often sucks in terms of customer service.  If they would
>just designate a couple of common markers as "known SPAM", the
>problem would have gone away

There's a fine line between 'blocking a couple of common markers'
and arbitrarily blocking domains, IP addresses and all mails containing
specific words - which some large ISPs do.  What's needed is a filter
system that allows users to control what they receive - not one where
the ISP gets to decide what is/isn't delivered.

When W32.Swen first hit, I was getting "mailbox near quota" messages
if I didn't empty my home mailbox for about 8 hours.  I asked my ISP
when they would be implementing something to let me control what was
delivered into my mailbox and eventually managed to get a "we're
looking into the problem" response.  I started running fetchmail as a
work-around (which stops the quota DOS but does nothing to help my
download bandwidth).  AFAIK, they still haven't done anything.

And Australia's biggest ISP (Telstra BigPond) is currently getting
unfavourable mentions in Parliament and the media because it's e-mail
system can't cope - users are claiming e-mails are being delayed a
week or more, or just aren't arriving.

>people forced to use Earthlink ("forced", because no matter where
>I go, Earthlink buys up my damn ISP -- no one talks about *that*
>monocoluture being a threat).

Mumble years ago, I heard a talk on this phenomenom.  They problem
boils down to ISP interconnect agreements - they generally wind up
meaning the small ISP has to pay the big ISP (or Internet wholesaler)
whatever the big ISP asks because their customers need to exchange
packets with IP addresses "owned" by the big ISP and the big ISP
doesn't have as much incentive to route packets to the smaller ISP.
This is a positive feedback loop with the bigger ISP absorbing all the
smaller ones.

>This is an inherent flaw in a store-with-quota+pickup-transiently
>model, which is what any POP3/IMAP4 forces their users into, and
>that means *any* ISP, even ones that give you full time connections,
>when they refuse to let you run your own mail server, either by
>explicitly disallowing it, or by not providing you a static IP.

Optus Internet (my home ISP) state that they block incoming traffic
to TCP/25 to prevent them being being black-listed for allowing
people to run promiscuous SMTP relays.  This is probably at least
partly true.

>  A non-quotaed maildrop would fix it.

How do you stop the weenies never deleting e-mail so their mailboxes
grow indefinitely?  A better solution would be a soft-quota'd
maildrop.  As long as you get to it every few days you don't get DOS'd
but if you never delete your mail you get bitten.  Of course, from an
ISP perspective, there's the problem of several thousand mailboxes
each receiving several hundred 200KB mails each day - that's an awful
lot of maildrop disk space to have to find in a hurry.

>Can you imagine if someone wrote one of these things to *actively*
>target an ISP with a stupid network topology like Earthlink?

Do you know of any ISPs that do a better job of upstream filtering?

>  You
>could drive the company out of business by chasing all their
>subscribers away by denying them the ability to receive communications
>from almost anyone else on the Internet.  I'm really surprised these
>idiots are unwilling to do anything about saving their business model
>from extinction.

The problem is that it doesn't really hurt the ISP - they (typically)
charge for downlink usage, so they're making more money by not blocking
SPAM.  The customers have to put up with it because they know the
competing ISPs aren't any better.

"Death of USENET predicted ... Film at 11" can probably be updated.

Peter