[rescue] Spam (was: Perverse Question)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 04:13:24PM -0400, Rich Kulawiec wrote:

> Ow.  Owwww.  OWOWOWOWOOWW.  My head hurts already.

I think it won't be that bad.

For one thing... you start implementing it on the big servers first.
What they do first is they annoy the other mail server admins
and the users, and they bounce only a small portion of the email.

Escalate until the pain forces upgrades.

If you do this, I think fixes will be deployed rather quickly.

Pain is a powerful motivator.

I believe this is how the move to TCP/IP was handled.  It was an
escalation of pain and a hard deadline, right?

> This is already long, but let me touch on the RMX ("reverse MX") idea(s)
> briefly.  

This would probably help.

Combine it with a reverse MX for each hop in the headers and it should
be nearly foolproof.

However, this is a big traffic increase.

> And it will be a huge argument and a nasty, painful process of implementation.
> 
> Which is why I still think it's simpler to just unplug the spammers.

That's not a solution, though.

I think tightening up SMTP transfer is the only way in the long run.


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