Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 04:24:01 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Szilveszter Adam" <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu>, <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: misc/26744: Unable to send mail to FreeBSD.org from home and from work Message-ID: <010301c0cb1e$bb1be9c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <200104220910.f3M9A2p86919@freefall.freebsd.org>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Szilveszter Adam > > Ted, please. Don't shout. You are writing a FAQ entry right? No, I'm writing a FAQ _submission_ which is different than an entry. This implies that whoever the FAQ maintainer is, that person is free to completely munge my entry beyond all recognition, and I expect that. I'm writing it from my point of vew and as such I'm obligated to make the best case for it. I would probably have written it differently if I was the actual FAQ maintainer because the maintainer has to edit the FAQ in such a way as to not piss off people, yet still get their point across. Since I'm only doing a submission, I'm free to be as obnoxious and radical as I want. :-) And, it so happens that I do feel strongly about this issue and I will be obnoxious and radical, because I think I'm right. :-) You are, of course, also free to write as obnoxious and radical FAQ entry as you want, from the completely opposite point of view. Then the FAQ maintainer takes both entries and either can side with you, or with me, or can try to find some compromise middle ground. You >are trying > to explain things to somebody who already has taken the trouble to check > the FAQ, although nobody could possibly have told him that on any FreeBSD > list, since his mails would never get through, not even to -questions, > which is plain stupid BTW. How are you supposed to DTRT and ask if your > mail is rejected? But this is another topic. > Which I answered by a second followup adjusting the webpage that lists the mailing lists. > Additionally, I really would > like to see this preamble go. It simply smacks of "I have my gun and I own > this house and I can do whatever the hell I want in it." This my be a > popular line in some peoples' minds, but I would certainly not like it to > see propagate and spread as something that should be followed. >While it may > be argued that you can do things to your machine, but a machine that hosts > mailing lists, esp one for an OpenSource project that >(notwithstanding Wes's > comments to the contrary and his appreciation for the "Line up or >Get lost!" > approach taken by OpenBSD) actually cares about acceptance and is >dependent > on the people outta there, is not entirely yours and yours only >anymore. You > have volunteered to open it up, this brings responsibilities with it. This > is not to make you happy, but to make the others happy. Sorry, that's the > way it is. It especially resonates funny with the "The Power to Serve" > slogen of the whole project. Who on earth are we serving then? > > This has nothing to do with blocking spam, this is just a > general remark. > I hear you, but understand that unless everyone on the Internet adopts the principle that a person's right to reject any arbitrary mail message on their mailserver for whatever reason is inviolate, then your opening the door to the spammers who all want to pass laws that require that ISP's accept spam that's "properly marked as spam" I don't know if you know this but either the ORBS or the MAPS database has already been sued by a spammer making exactly this argument - that they are providing a service that users want and that MAPS or ORBS has no right to interfere with mail transmission to a public mailserver. You can't even hint that any part of this is anything other than a problem at the transmitter's mailserver, or your going right down the road that the spammers want you to go down. Yes, I understand that in some cases it may be a lot easier for freebsd.org to change than for the user to change, but this is clearly the case of the good of the many outweighing the good of the few. By accepting that it's freebsd.org's problem, and thus they should change, your accepting the argument that they don't have total and absolute control over their mailserver anymore, because it's "public" Now, yes you can make a case that freebsd.org's existence is to serve the public, thus they are contrary to that principle by refusing any mail message. But, then the problem is "what defines a public mailserver that should implement these kinds of controls and what defines a public mailserver that shouldn't be implementing these kinds of controls" Well, the answer is "It's a grey decision." The problem with that, is that legislation does not like grey - they want everything black and white. From the law's point of view, if any public mailserver should be required to accept all mail, then _every_ public mailserver should be required to accept all mail. The law in every country in this day and age does not appear to want to get into depth with technology - I don't know if this is because legislators are afraid of it, or don't understand it or what. Nevertheless, if the attitude DOESEN'T get spread that "I have my gun and I own this house and I can do whatever the hell I want in it." in the case of Internet mailservers, then we will eventually have legislated spam, which would be far more damaging than a few people that can't subscribe to a mailing list. > Just as an aside, this alleged spam protection does not help >much: The most > spam I receive comes through the FreeBSD lists. And this, >although my real > email > address is available in many public list archives on the web... it seems > that spammers do have enough open relays at their disposal that >match all of > your criteria. Sigh. > Yes, I agree with this as well. I've been spamfighting a long, long time and in fact several years ago I wrote a series of articles that are up on the web that detail how to do it. I've come to the understanding that there is only one sure method of spamfighting that works, and thats content-filtering on the mailserver. I kill far, far more spam by filtering mail with words like "cum" or strings like "this is the best work at home" or "this is not a pyramind scheme" or my favorite "This e-mail sent in accordance", that last one is good for a large amount of spam. But, I also recognize that to some people the idea of content-filtering is political, and so they won't content-filter, and so they take whatever means are available to them to try and block spam. > > [explanation] > > Unfortunately, the increased amount of spamming done on the Internet > > has forced most administrators running mailservers to take action to > > block spam, or mail messages that have a high probability of >being spam. > > Much better. > > <...snip...> > > If your ISP's mailserver is screwed for some reason, then find >what is known > > as > > a "promiscious open relay" mailserver on the Internet and use >that. (it's a > > poor substitute, since those systems generally get black-holed >very quickly > > by > > ORBS and MAPS) Or, better yet, complain to your ISP, this is what your > > paying them > > for. > > Yeah. And if you are not paying them (like most university students here) > and they have a stupid policy of not allowing relaying from all the > machines but just a couple, than you are SOL. This means in my case no > send-pr from my machine. (since I am of course not on the allowed >list) and > you cannot even do a whole lot. Because they are also people who believe > that they are not here to serve others but to do whatever the hell they > want... sad. > How can they discriminate between your server and some arbitrary student's Win95 system? From the mailserver, both of you look exactly the same, you both communicate via SMTP. And, you are NOT sol either because you have several alternatives. First, you can elect to pay some other provider on the Internet for mail access. For example, at the ISP I work at we have shell accouts at $60 per year that you can ssh into and run Pine. Or, if you have a fixed IP number you could tell us and we would put it in the list of allowed relays and you could relay through us, and pop your mail from our server. There's got to be plenty of other ISP's out there that do this, some located closer to you. Or, if you can receive mail on a static IP number but not send it, then you can also find some kind admin on the net that will allow you to relay through their server for free - for example, I'd do it on my own home mailserver that's on a DSL line. Finally, there's the web-interface mail providers like hotmail. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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