[governance] Re: Antispam practices

[Shantanoo Mahajan]

+++ Stephane Bortzmeyer [25-09-06 10:49 +0200]:
| On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 10:19:08AM +0200,
|  Patrick Vande Walle <patrick at vande-walle.eu> wrote 
|  a message of 54 lines which said:
| 
| > Forcing connections to go through well maintained and identified
| > SMTP servers
| 
| ISP server != well-maintained server. Actually, a reason why many
| people do *not* want to go through the ISP email servers is because
| they are not well-maintained: they lose or delay messages and you have
| no way of knowing it, no observation is possible.
| 
| More on-topic for this list: more and more ISP force users to go
| through their servers for various reasons (the last trend is to block
| port 53 and to force users to use the ISP's DNS servers, then to have
| wildcards in these servers, a la Earthlink). This is clearly a serious
| and on-topic issue for this group.

Few issues while using ISP's SMTP:
- Unmainted (as mentioned above)
- Message size limit (my ISP has 3 MB size limit, which many times is
  the reason of not using it)
- Delays (as mentioned above)
- Many won't allow you to change the 'From:' field. e.g.
  shantanoo+nospam at gmail dot com comes to shantanoo at gmail dot
  com. I (used to) prefer (when I had less bandwidth) to use different
  from address so that it becomes easy for me to filter the e-mails.

| 
| > It should have a valid DNS PTR record bearing your machine's name
| > and not 123.456.789.012-dsl.myisp.com.

But reverse PTR is has to be given by the ISP. Nowadays manys ISPs are
providing reverse PTR but not all do that.

| 
| No RFC ever said so. The possible future RFC (see
| http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-dnsop-reverse-mapping-considerations-00.txt)
| does not say so.
| 
| > You cannot achieve that with a dynamic IP.
| 
| You can, with dynamic DNS.

This takes care of forward PTR only.

Possible additional solutions which I think are:
- open SPF (easily implemented)
- Yahoo! domainkeys (more secure(?))

IMO, once IPv6 is implemented, every user will have static IP. That
will help reduce the spam drastically quite easily.

Shantanoo
-- 
Few minds wear out; more rust out.  ~Christian N. Bovee
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance