On Fri, May 23, 1997 at 08:07:01PM -0500, Jim Choate wrote:

Forwarded message:

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From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> Date: Fri, 23 May 97 08:29:59 -0500

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No not at all. Just because I am connected to the network I am under no obligation to accept a single bit. I don't have to ever download any mail or I can download all or I can pick and choose what I accept or what I don't.

Exactly,

Once a bit is on the wire you either accept it or effectively disconnect. Period. If you (or your lower network layer surrogates) convince the other side not to send, that's one thing. But at the point the bits enter your site, you have no choice.

This is the whole point of a firewall after all. Simply connecting your cable to a publicly accessible source implies no more than having your driveway end in a public street. It is NOT an open invitation to stroll through your living room.

That's a false analogy. You really say "send me *all* bits, and I will look at them and *decide* what to do with them." Your firewall has to receive the bits before it can decide what to do about them. Any decision about what bits to send and what bits not to send must be made externally to you -- your equipment and software automatically receives every single bit sent to it.

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Obviously you have not ever entered into contract agreements with an accesses provider. There is no obligation on my part to receive a single bit. If I never run a sendmail daemon then I will never receive a single e-mail message regardless of how many are aimed at my servers. This is the same with any TCP/IP service. The only obligation I have with my upstream provider is to pay my bill. If I choose to bounce everything that is routed from Spamford it is my right to do so as it is *MY* equipment.

This is certainly the exact case between myself and my provider for SSZ.

You have to receive the bits before you bounce them. As far as turning off your sendmail daemon -- that is just moving the discussion up a protocol level. You are still stuck with the choice of accepting all mail, or disconnecting and receiving none -- if you elect to receive any mail you receive it all. Once you get it, you can decide to throw it away, but you still have to receive it to make that decision. This is the conundrum of spam. It exploits a fundamental weakness in our communication protocols, and illustrates a fundamental philosophical problem in the realm of freedom of speech through a finite bandwidth communication channel -- what happens when someone uses their freedom of speech to overload the channel, thus interfering with everyone else's freedom of speech? (An information theoretic "tragedy of the commons".) Clearly, it seems to me, freedom of speech should not include the freedom to destroy others freedom of speech by overloading the channel. But to avoid this problem you need protocols that govern access to the channel...protocols which do not exist for email. And even if you develop such protocols you still have the channel overload problem. You can only read so much email a day -- your human input bandwidth is limited. The supply of interesting email is essentially unlimited. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html