On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 01:07:29PM -0700, Stanton McCandlish wrote:

If/when MAPS dies, this problem is going to *explode*. Hardly anyone used ORBS and this has already caused a lot of people severe headaches that still continue. But, maybe the problem will be so big if/when that happens that blacklists will largely be simply abandoned.

In principle I'm not sure if this is a terribly difficult problem to solve. If the costs to subscribing to antispamlists are still not as great as the (growing) problem of spam, admins will still want a service and someone will probably create it. Given sufficient demand of this sort, a standard interface may well emerge. This would allow sites to subscribe to a antispamlist maintainer uber-service that would selectively add and drop MAPS/ORBS/etc. as they become more and less useful. This may be a pay service. It would allow ISPs and individual users not to worry about what happens if one service dies; within a few moments, one hopes, the maintainer service would remove it. Queries would go to the maintainer service, not the individual antispamlists. The maintainer service could also provide the useful feature of a standard interface; give it an IP address and it would query the antispamlist vendors using their individual different protocols.

NB: I'm not against individual spam filtering - I do it agressively myself, and subscribe to several group-maintained *invidual-use* blacklists that I've chosen to trust (more or less). I'm referring to ISP-level "stealth blocking", esp. that based on the technical capabilities of the sending site, rather than said site being a known spam house.

Obviously ISPs see a benefit to using antispamlists. Just arguing against them isn't very persuasive; it doesn't give them a way to solve their growing spam problem. If EFF is concerned about this policy area (and I recognize it may be just your personal opinion), it may want to provide the useful service of recommending ways to improve the protocols and what marketing flacks call "best practices." If people begin to care about what you call stealth blocking, ISPs will probably begin to disclose it. Perhaps an ISP trade association will recommend a link on the home page. Then you could take your business to an ISP, if you care enough, that does not subscribe to antispamlists -- as long as you're willing to pay more because of the additional bandwidth, storage, and personnel costs imposed by the higher volume of spam. -Declan