Every single time I've heard a sendmail newbie (or any mail admin wannabe) saying "oh, but, an open relay is the only way to solve THIS particular problem".... it's turned out that the admin was totally unaware of the facilities built into the software (or the engineering of the entire mail infrastructure) that handle doing exactly what was desired, without opening up relaying. An open relay is a clear indicator of one of two things: ignorance, or malicious intent. Jay

But what IF a major service provider was to decide to "reduce spam" by prefenting ALL of their residential customers from accessing and SMTP server but their own [the cable company's]..... This has actually happended here in NY. You MUST use their SMTP server!!!! [they have blocked ALL outbound traffic on port 25 except to their IP!]

Blocking a whole domain is silly, to me at least from the ISP prospective. I defend an end client's right to do so though. I am not aware of ORBS blocking whole domains, however, there ARE some domains out there that are so exclusively the home of spammers I can certainly understand it. Of course mail server admins are free to do what they want, including open relaying. However, I am also free to disallow my servers from talking to servers run by such admins. Not a whole domain, but a particular mail server. I guess is someone is infected with a contagious disease, one can argue it is their right to stand on a street corner and intentionally cough on everyone. But... I also have every right to walk away and not put myself in contact with them. Same thing for mail servers. If someone configures their server in such a careless way that my server connecting to it can cause my server a problem (50gb of spam), I have every right to decide not to allow connections to that mail server. Jay --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

They're not morons, they just have a ruthless attitude about companies that won't enforce their own AUP. That's how Sprint got whole IP blocks blacklisted. It likely never would have happened had they actually gone after the spammers lurking on their networks. g.

That's ok. Frankly I wish they'd issue hunting licenses for spammers so I could firebomb their homes legally. :) g.

Paul Koning wrote: That was ORBS, IIRC, and I have to agree with you concerning their apparent intelligence. Their practices and processes seem much closer to ideological extortion than to spam prevention. Doc

On 03/09/2004, at 3:42 AM, Jay West wrote: ISTR that at one stage all of .au was blacklisted by one of the Blacklisting services. My ISP blocks outgoing port 25 connections but my e-mail provider (not my ISP but a very nice VMS cluster) is now accessible on another (secured) port. Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"

Are you trying to say that when my mail server connects to theirs (or vice versa) and gets a diskfilling denial of service due to spam that causes my system to crash and or become unusable, which takes out service for thousands of my customers, isn't harassment? Of COURSE it is. WRONG - give me an example of this "local convenience". Just take 10 minutes to configure the allowable src/dst and it wont be necessary. So what you are saying is it's ok to create a dangerous situation rather than configure it right to only allow relaying from truely local domains because it's "out of reach". I see two problems with your stance. First, that system MAY be "off the net". But what if a year later it's decided to add it to the net? Or second, what happens if it's configured for open relaying and is behind a firewall, and later some hacker gets around the firewall (read: VPN)? They then have a machine "ready to r0ck dudez!". Just do your JOB in the first place, instead of being LAZY and none of this is an issue. Let me give you an analogy in response. Setting a can of gasoline and an open flame lantern next to eachother on the sidewalk of a busy street is a STUPID idea. But you know what? Setting a can of gasoline and an open flame latern next to eachother in the privacy of your own home, behind locked doors... is *STILL* irresponsible. It's just plain LAZY. setting it up right IS low setup and low maintenance. Setting it up wrong is begging for high cost. More specifically, an admin who takes the route of.. "Oh, I'm just going to allow open relay because it SHOULDNT cause a problem", is someone who is careless and more importantly, leaving a large timebomb waiting for some other admin later (or themselves) to step on. I could ALMOST see your point if configuring the allowable src/dst was a non trivial task. The fact is, it takes just a couple minutes. So sys admins who use that excuse are just plain lazy, and irresponsible. Unfortunately, they are not just putting themselves at peril, they are putting others at peril due to their laziness. Jay --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

Der Mouse... just wanted you to know I wasn't attacking you directly. Got home and reread the posts from today and realized it could have come across that way. My apologies. We've talked offlist and I know you're a competent admin so I didn't want to appear to attack you personally. We do, however, steadfastly disagree on the open relay issue, which is perfectly ok :) Regards, Jay West