On 08/11/2011 11:12 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Josh Miller wrote: >> In fact, that is one of the single most effective mechanisms used to >> combat spam, in my experience and will cut down the amount accepted at >> the gateway(s) by up to 95%. > > I'm not sure who you're answering or agreeing with, but my point is still > that 90% of everybody blocked has no clue whatever about what to do about > it, and esp. the people with infected systems. A standard channel *to* an > ISP for this kind of technical issue - either the ISP notifying the > spammer that their machine needs to be cleaned before they'll be allowed > back online, or between ISP, would do something useful. But I doubt very > much that most of those 90% of users who are *not* spammers, nor infected, > would have any idea to complain to their ISP that something needed to be > done, and so the ISP goes on thinking there's no problem. The result that > *I* see from that is that people simply drop, or change services, and > nothing gets fixed. > <snip> Mark, I totally understand your viewpoint. I have been that guy on the phone with Comcast demanding that port 25 be un-blocked so that I could continue hosting email from my home ISP as part of my service agreement included the ability to check/send/receive email on-line (that only worked 2-3 times). The problem is that most home users don't host mail and don't care to. Along with that attitude is the fact that a significant amount of spam comes from IP addresses that are dynamically assigned or assigned by residential serving ISPs. It's much easier to block those IP ranges than to care that someone might be sending a few messages out of one of them from a reputable domain. Also, where I'm from (greater Seattle area even), you don't have much choice as far as ISPs go, so changing service providers is not a big option. -- Josh Miller Open Source Solutions Architect http://itsecureadmin.com/