[Techtalk] Over-zealous spam filtering (by Raven's ISP?)

[Nils Philippsen]

On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 08:00, Raven Brooke wrote:
[...]
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, James wrote:
[...]
> > (It's also pretty rude: "553 ##### YOU HAVE BEEN SHIT-LISTED **..." - 
> > hardly a helpful message to send other Net users!
> 
> 
> I'm sorry if this offended you, but if you saw even a small percentage of 
> the "XXX These women will actually fsck animals! XXX" mails that caused us 
> to create the banned-for-spamming.us domain you might agree that this is a 
> very mild response.

1. Given that I have yet to receive spam with a valid return address
(and I get much), the only audience to read this is people who are
unlucky enough to use an ISP that someone else used for spamming.

2a. Given that the chance for that rises with the size of one's ISP and

2b. given that the chance that an ISP will send snail-mail apologies to
you sinks with the size of an ISP, it is clear that this doesn't help
anything:

You will end up with a situation where your clients
(/friends/family/...) won't be able to get email from "most of the
planet", because it is totally beyond reason to expect from anyone to
send you a letter (which costs money) due to the wrongdoings of someone
else. Unless I'm really desperate, I just won't do that, whether I'm an
ISP who's unfortunate enough that spam was sent from one of its accounts
or whether I'm one of its customers.

[ list of ISPs deleted ]

I was surprised that the only German domains I could find in the list
were two research agencies and a college. To be consequent you really
have to add t-dialin.net and/or t-online.de, my provider to your list.
Too bad that you would ban surely half of the German DSL users (if not
more than that) from sending you mails.

> yup, all these offenders are guilty, guilty guilty of sending unsolicited 
> and sometimes highly offensive material to us and/or our friends, family 
> (including our teenage children) and the few others who share our 
> mailserver. They bring this stuff in our home once, we don't invite 'em 
> back.

I guess you also ban the postman if you received a rude letter in the
past. Hey, if not even the technically-savvy can distinguish the bearer
from the offender in this case, how do we expect this from our
legislators and judges? Do you really expect large nation-wide ISPs to
mental-screen their prospective customers to catch spammers before they
commit their crimes? I haven't seen it (yet), but from the trailers I
saw this sounds a lot like the "Minority Report" movie to me.

> Once again James, I apologise if you or anyone on the list was 
> inconvenienced. Thank you for being concerned :-)

You should be very cautious here -- no one can force you to accept their
email, but your blocking message just screams for some "psychologically
instable" kid with too-wealthy-for-their-own-good parents getting
"mentally harmed" by your message. Watch out, I can smell litigation
there...

Think about it, if someone told my child (hypothetically for the moment,
but we're working on it) "Philippsen, you are on my shit-list" just
because we lived in the same district as someone else whom we don't even
know, who called that first someone names, I would at least have a very
long, very not-so-funny talk with them.

To put a long story short acting like this won't help anyone:

- Spammers just couldn't care less -> they won't go away because someone
ignores/rejects them (I guess spam gets ignored/rejected/dropped by
nearly all of the recipients)
- You will offend and or cause hassle to a lot of "innocent bystanders"
and ISPs
- You will end up with not being able to communicate with at least a
large chunk of the net

The only ones who win here are possibly (but not likely) the
post-offices, they get a few bucks more for people who really need to be
able to send you email.

You surely have heard about "breaking a fly on a wheel", haven't you?

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Berliner Straße 39 / D-71229 Leonberg //
+49.7152.209647
   nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils at redhat.de / nils at lisas.de
   PGP fingerprint:  C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F  656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011
       Ever noticed that common sense isn't really all that common?
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