Spam blocklists?

[Peter Fairbrother]

 Greg Broiles wrote:
[...]
>> Osirusoft seems to be a spam blocker, but blocking legitimate mail is going
>> too far. I'd rather have the spam. And I object strongly to third (or
>> fourth) parties deciding what to do with my mail.
> 
> It's the recipient, or someone acting on their behalf, who's deciding what
> to do with
> *their* mail, at least from the recipient's perspective.

One of the ISP's I use (only until the contract ends!!) now forces me to
employ spam blocking, I have no choice.

Quote "It is necessary for Freezone Internet to put such measures in place
in order to ensure that other mail servers on the Internet do not block
traffic originating from Freezone Internet's mail servers. If Freezone
Internet were to be blocked, eventually over 90% of your email potentially
may not be received or delivered to its recipients."

IMO this is just plain wrong.



Spam is a problem, no doubt, but it's not evil or anything, and I object to
people stopping my email, for whatever reason (DoS attacks are another
matter).

There used to be an offence of interfering with the Royal Mail (in the UK,
with horrendous penalties). While the per-message cost of email is so low
that that concept is no longer viable for email, there must be better ways
to limit spam.

For instance, limiting the number of recipients of an email (the cryptogeek
system I'm working on [m-o-o-t] just allows one), or limiting the number of
emails one IP can send per day (adjusted for number of users).


There was an EU proposal to force spammers (who are not always unwanted) to
put [ADV] in the Subject: line, with appropriate penalties if they failed
to, but it didn't happen (and we got long-term traffic data retention
instead).


I don't know offhand how to do it, but having unelected and unaccountable
people (making the conditions for) stopping my email is unacceptable. If
somehow there was a limit to the number of people an email could be sent to
without a willing "passing on" by a human, that could limit the damage spam
could do, and be a better way to do it than involving stopping real (false
positive) emails.

A slightly drunk (you don't see me here very drunk that often, lucky
someone.... ,

-- Peter Fairbrother