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Re: SMTP Port Blocking
If "the issues" are the possibility that some customers of Cox High Speed Internet might abuse the port, for spam, then its a sad day for freedom of speech that we are prepared to roll over and accept it, even though it is prior restraint and inconveniences the innocent majority as well as the guilty. There's an interesting, if horrifying, discussion at Tech Review between Dave Crocker, who should know what he's talking about ("I am starting to suspect that our impatience to take some action against spam will turn out to be the most serious barrier to taking useful action against it. Rather than trying to gain control of spam by attacking it at its social and technical core, we seem to want to let the spammers define our response and, thereby, let them change the entire nature of e-mail."), and an ISP operator ("The current model of e-mail is doomed. It was a nice experiment but it didn't work out. What we need to do now is move to a sender-pays model, perhaps with some allowance for bona-fide personal usage.") http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/dialog0703.asp?p=0 Interesting to consider that ISPs per se didn't exist when RFC822 & SMTP based email was developed, everyone more or less rolled their own. Given this distributed model, its unsuprising that centralised aggregations (like the horror of @hotmail or @aol, making dictionary attacks worthwhile due to the large number of users in a single domain, rather like the World Trade Center in a way) are complaining the most about the problem. I handle my own mail, and don't suffer much (mostly because I use disposable addresses, practice some simple email hygiene and have SpamAssassin tag the likely suspects). Its generally better in my opinion, to wear slippers, rather than carpet the world. Whatever "junk mail" costs us, I wouldn't lose the service over it... as Dave Crocker observes, however much bathwater there is, there's still a baby in there... There are responses to this message:
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