What are your thoughts on.....

"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
but I do mind people flat out calling me a liar when they don't
have the facts on their side.

I don't think anyone called you a liar. Idiot, perhaps, for attempting to
debate a topic that you, quite obviously, have no background in. But liar?
Naw.

--
Jim Fisher

In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
My ISP provides this kind of "service", and once I found out what was going
on, I told them to disable it for my email. I don't get any more spam than
I used to, and I don't have friends and family complaining that they can't
send me email anymore.

Lucky you. I get around 120 emails a day - on average, 118 are spam.

SpamAssassin 2.60 does a much better job at filtering the spam than I
can do by hand. Filtering by hand is prone to false positives too. I've
also employed the SBL-XBL (a realtime listing of compromised machines,
as well as those owned by the worst spam-gangs) to reject as much as the
obvious spam as possible.

There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).
--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
Lucky you. I get around 120 emails a day - on average, 118 are spam.

You only get two pieces of email a day that aren't spam? Why do you even
bother? You don't have any reason to even use the Internet for mail, as
near as I can tell. I don't see what your anomalous situation has to do
with this sub-thread though.

SpamAssassin 2.60 does a much better job at filtering the spam than I
can do by hand.

It sure does. Like I said, SpamAssassin already filters out everything that
might have been blocked by the black-hole list my ISP was using.

[...]
There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).

You, like several other people, are not bothering to read what I wrote.

In only ONE instance is the blocked email coming from a friend's own mail
server. All of the other blocked email messages WERE sent through their
ISP's mail server and they ARE blocked by the black-hole list service.

I don't know why this is so hard for you guys to grasp. You keep claiming
that the service isn't doing what I say that it does do. I know what it
does, I spent a huge amount of time learning about it (when the bounces
first started happening, I didn't have any idea why), and I know for a fact
that it is blocking perfectly legitimate email for absolutely no good
reason.

The whole concept is paternalistic crap. It punishes ISPs, especially the
largest ones (since they have the most exposure), even if they are doing
their best to keep spam off of their networks, and causes no end of
headaches for legitimate users.

Spam filtering is well and good but any proper solution will NEVER EVER
block legitimate email. One single false positive is simply unacceptable.
It is better to accept more false negatives instead.

Pete

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 20:21:02 -0600, Darrel Toepfer
wrote:

Peter Duniho wrote:
Darrel Toepfer wrote...

Blocking the dialup/cable/dsl modem pooled IP's of another ISP are the
necessary evils of being an ISP.

No, they are not. Not when the ISPs being blocked are actively anti-spam.

There is no valid reason to allow dialup accounts to send SMTP direct.
Route the mail through the provider's server, works for millions of
other people...

I find it surprising that a dial-up would even bother trying to be
their own server except for strictly educational means. For that
matter, why would a cable user bother to do so when they can use the
provider and it's so much simpler.

I can think of no reason not to block mail from dynamic IP hosts.

Yet, I do know of one person who insists on using his own server and
mail server on cable. Never have figured out why.

Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com

In article , Peter Duniho wrote:
snip: only 2 legitimate emails a day/why email?
I only get a couple of phone calls a day. I still have a phone.
Difference is my phone doesn't get spammed. Even on days where I get ten
or eleven legitimate emails, having to pick them out from over 100 spam
emails is not feasable so filtering has to be employed.

I don't know why this is so hard for you guys to grasp. You keep claiming
that the service isn't doing what I say that it does do. I know what it
does, I spent a huge amount of time learning about it (when the bounces
first started happening, I didn't have any idea why), and I know for a fact
that it is blocking perfectly legitimate email for absolutely no good
reason.

No, I'm not. I don't make any claims as to what your ISP does. My
article was about a particular approach with RBLs, and that was to use a
combination of the SBL-XBL and SpamAssassin. The former does not block
ISPs smart hosts. The SBL-XBL is one of the more conservative RBLs -
it's not SPEWS.

The whole concept is paternalistic crap. It punishes ISPs, especially the
largest ones (since they have the most exposure)

The SBL-XBL doesn't list any of the large ISP's smarthosts. AOL et al.
get delivered fine. AOL is also doing useful things like putting SPF
(http://spf.pobox.com) records in their DNS zones so I can tell if mail
claiming to be from AOL really is from AOL before I accept it (a lot of
spam comes with forged AOL headers. SpamAssassin can score against
forged headers).

Spam filtering is well and good but any proper solution will NEVER EVER
block legitimate email. One single false positive is simply unacceptable.

This is impossible. If you get a lot of spam, even filtering by hand still
gets false positives - either that or you spend several hours a day
making doubly sure you're not going to hand-filter ham as spam, in which
case email becomes cost-ineffective. I know that before SA/SBL-XBL I
accidentally deleted emails because they looked to me like spam.

To be honest, I wouldn't consider email a reliable method of
communication thanks to the spammers. Things like SPF will help as it
will mean we can tell if From: headers are forged from the get-go, but
unless ISPs get more agressive about stopping the spam problem (giving
users firewalled access by default instead of anything goes - definitely
blocking outbound port 25, rate limiting their smart hosts so
residential users are limited on how many emails they can send per day
etc.) it's only going to get worse.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

Dylan Smith wrote:

I only get a couple of phone calls a day. I still have a phone.
Difference is my phone doesn't get spammed.

One of the advantages of living in Britain. If I get only two calls a day, I'm
lucky. Most of the calls are spam. I pay an extra $7.50 a month for "caller ID"
to allow me to avoid most of it, and we're on the national "don't call" list,
which is supposed to stop most of it (and which the telemarketers simply ignore).
One of the most annoying things about it is that, if you *do* answer the phone,
many of these guys have software that delays the response (to avoid answering
macines, I expect), and they don't even answer until you've said "Hello" three
or four times. I've gotten to the point that I say "Hello" once and, if nobody
replies, I hang up.

George Patterson
Battle, n; A method of untying with the teeth a political knot that would
not yield to the tongue.

In article , Roger Halstead
wrote:

I find it surprising that a dial-up would even bother trying to be
their own server except for strictly educational means. For that
matter, why would a cable user bother to do so when they can use the
provider and it's so much simpler.

some reasons:

because the provider has proven to be unreliable.

because it is really to change email addresses.

because I'm a geek.


I can think of no reason not to block mail from dynamic IP hosts.

that doesn't mean there are any valid reasons to block all
email from dynamic IP hosts.


Yet, I do know of one person who insists on using his own server and
mail server on cable. Never have figured out why.

see above.

--
Bob Noel

In article , Dylan Smith
wrote:

There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).

"no legitimate reason"? huh?

--
Bob Noel

(Ben) wrote in message . com...
Would an
airplane owner ever offer to share operating expenses for payment to
share a plane?

A lot of airplane owners do this.

To simplify, they calculate the cost per hour based on the hourly
operating cost and the fixed cost (stuff like insurance, oil changes,
etc) per expected number of hours used, and use that calculated hourly
cost as a basis for collecting payments.

This arrangement is usually called "renting."

In article , Bob Noel
wrote:
In article , Dylan Smith
wrote:

There is no legitimate reason why a *.client.comcast.net address should
be emailing me - anyone on cable/DSL etc. should send their mail through
their ISP's smart host (which are NOT blocked by the SBL-XBL).

"no legitimate reason"? huh?

If you want to run servers at home, get a proper business account
instead of using a consumer account. Or get a virtual private server
somewhere (they aren't expensive, especially when you consider the
electricity costs of leaving a server-class machine on 24x7) The amount of
legitimate email vs Windows worms and spam I get from dynamic IP ranges
is so tiny that it doesn't even register as noise. During the Swen
outbreak, I was getting a couple of Swen emails per minute. Frankly, I'm
fed up with it. Use your ISP's smarthost or if you really insist on
running your own mailserver, pony up for a business account, or get a
VPS and run your own SMTP server there.

Still, I use the SBL-XBL because it doesn't just indiscriminately block
all ranges, just the ones that are particular problems.

I also reject any email with a Windows executable at the DATA stage.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"