[Mailman-Developers] Opening up a few can o' worms here...

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 7/16/02 4:44 PM, "John W Baxter" <jwblist@olympus.net> wrote:

> I don't think the ISPs *can* solve the problem in the near-to-medium-term
> future.  [Longer term, with the demise of SMTP and its "everything open to
> all except for a few bandaids" approach, maybe.]

Me, I'm just not that worried about this idea, any more than I worry about
the 'we simply need to redo e-mail so you pay to send things' -- because any
NEW system is going to have to be backwards compatible with the old system
for a significant period of time, iether directly or through some kind of
gateway system -- so there's a good period of time for the lot of us to find
ways of dealing with it. And don't forget, even the big ISPs use off the
shelf tools like sendmail, postfix, etc. if they really want to build
customized systems, it'll be really tough (and expensive) to do so without
the tools they bring in from the open source community, and as big as any of
the ISPs are, whatever protocols they create will have to be open at some
level, because while MSN is huge and AOL is huge, if AOL can't talk to MSN
and MSN can't talk to AOL, the protocol will fail.

And whatever protocol they build, open source can build something that works
with it. If they can reverse engineer samba, I'm not worried about e-mail
protocols. And given that most of the big boys build their systems
(increasingly) on linux and use open source extensively, I think the "big
boys will lock us all out" is a strawman. Which doesn't mean I don't think
we should not be vigilant, but...

> At some point, the SpamAssassin/quarantine model breaks down...

Yeah. When you're on deadline, and the admin is on vacation.

> As it is, we're busily installing four
> machines to do the work that one would do quite well in the absence of
> spammers (and they'll have help from another machine or two so that users
> can see their quarantined mail and rescue their false positives).  And yes,
> SpamAssassin is part of that picture.

Yup. That setup is fairly typical for high volume email systems these days.
But a number of the big e-mail systems who's admins I talk to are seeing as
much as 30% of the email being sent to the system rejected as spam, and the
numbers are growing.



-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/

The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet:
    And they all died happily ever after