24 Feb
2000
24 Feb
'00
3:42 a.m.
"James B. DiGriz" wrote:
[stuff deleted]
Nevertheless, it's not my list, and it's up to
you, Jay, as the
administrator, to run it as you see fit. I implore you, though, NOT to
use the DUL, at least, as this just flat out discriminates against those
of us who are forced by circumstance to run our mail servers on dial-up
dynamic IPs. No one has to complain to anyone that you have spammed. The
DUL simply collects all the known major ISP dynamic IP ranges
preemptively. This just isn't fair. They hide this in the fine print,
and then pass the blame to you, the sysadmin. (Oh, WE didn't block your
mail, complain to Jay West. (How, if he's blocking your mail?)) I've
lost out on at least one multi-thousand dollar deal because of this
nonsense.
In our case, on advise of corporate counsel, we've actually relaxed
our anti-smap measures somewhat. We don't have a reason to relay,
so we don't, and we still honor RBL, but we've tossed everything
else. It's a long and debatable argument, but in essence we've been
told that deciding to accept or reject messages based on origin
compromises our common carrier status and could effectively make us
liable if a downstream user was doing something illegal. Remember,
the law, particularly in the US, doesn't really care if something
is technically practical; once we demonstrate that we can filter
messages in *any* fashion it's trivial to be found liable for a
failure to filter in *every* fashion, particularly in a civil
action. We decided that no matter how remote the risk we didn't want
to be on the hook for some pedophile's on-line activities.
Interestingly, the opinion was that it's okay to filter *on behalf
of the user*, i.e., if the *user* tells us to filter the mail (or
constructs their own filters) then we're off the hook, in the
same fashion that calling number block/anonymous caller block can
be implemented by the telcos without affecting their CC status. So
now we're cooking up a scheme to allow not-terribly-technical users
to set procmail filters.
Chris
--
Chris Kennedy
chris(a)mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97