Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 16:42:03 +0200 From: Szilveszter Adam <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: misc/26744: Unable to send mail to FreeBSD.org from home and from work Message-ID: <20010422164203.H21216@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> In-Reply-To: <010301c0cb1e$bb1be9c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 04:24:01AM -0700 References: <200104220910.f3M9A2p86919@freefall.freebsd.org> <010301c0cb1e$bb1be9c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 04:24:01AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > No, I'm writing a FAQ _submission_ which is different than an entry. > This implies that whoever the FAQ maintainer is, that person is > free to completely munge my entry beyond all recognition, and I expect that. Well, I understand you, although as an FDP member (albeit a not very active one... I am working on debugging this:-) I would certainly appreciate submissions that require fewer work before commit and not a lot of "editing for clarity":-))))) but hey I am not the FAQ maintainer, soo... > You are, of course, also free to write as obnoxious and radical FAQ entry > as you want, from the completely opposite point of view. Then the FAQ > maintainer takes both entries and either can side with you, or with me, > or can try to find some compromise middle ground. OK. I am glad you did not take my mail as an affront because it was not meant to be one. I rarely reply to specific people in public and always fear that they might take it personally. My style is not to be obnoxious or radical (although the latter may show eventually but more in what I do than what I say.) Hey, I am even smiling in front of my monitor most of the time...:-) > Which I answered by a second followup adjusting the webpage that lists the > mailing lists. Yes, it looks better now. <huge snip> > I hear you, but understand that unless everyone on the Internet adopts > the principle that a person's right to reject any arbitrary mail message > on their mailserver for whatever reason is inviolate, then your opening > the door to the spammers who all want to pass laws that require that ISP's > accept spam that's "properly marked as spam" Heh. Yes, these are nifty people, they not only send you s**t they will even come back in person and lobby your Congresman. I know this and learned to, hmmm value their efforts. Luckily they are not as brazen here in Hungary but be assured if they were, I would be among the first to step up to stop them. Besides, they do not even bother to mark any of their mailings, or only very rarely. Also, many (most?) operate in such a way as to make law enforcement quite unlikely, since you need firm proof and usually all you find is a dialup whose owner seemingly doesn't know of anything, and this often in countries where cooperation is not an easy one to get. > I don't know if you know this but either the ORBS or the MAPS database has > already been sued by a spammer making exactly this argument - that they are > providing a service that users want and that MAPS or ORBS has no right to > interfere with mail transmission to a public mailserver. Yes I know about this and I hope they were not succesful. But I was not talking about this. A mailserver, even that of an ISP is not the same as a mailing list server. Why? Because the mail server takes over mail as that of its own, while a listserver only hands it out again. The fact that most ISP mail server do the same (eg via POP3) is immaterial, it is their function to deliver the mail to the recipients that they serve (they take mail on their own behalf) a list server, however, takes it on others' behalves. While this may sound very dense, it is this way legal distinctions are made. It is some governing principle and not the actual mode of operation that counts. Why is this important? Because otherwise, if you say that all mail servers are equal, then someone may well say that you, as a list admin or the admin of a maillist server, are responsible for the content that passes through your list. While in other case, you can defend that you are a mere conduit. Maybe I am just focused on different things than you are, but I would be more afraid of this possibility than of spam. And if you say this is not likely to happen I tell you that it is not very likely that spam will be legal any time soon in Hungary... so in theory I could sue all of them spammers. Of course it would be quite futile, but in theory. <...> > But, then the problem is "what defines a public mailserver that should > implement > these kinds of controls and what defines a public mailserver that > shouldn't be implementing these kinds of controls" Well, the answer is > "It's a > grey decision." Yes, see above for a possible solution, with a reasoning. Mere conduits should not in any way interfere with the contents, so they can very effectively protect themselves from liability. > The problem with that, is that legislation does not like grey - they want > everything > black and white. From the law's point of view, if any public mailserver > should > be required to accept all mail, then _every_ public mailserver should be > required > to accept all mail. The law in every country in this day and age does not > appear > to want to get into depth with technology - I don't know if this is because > legislators > are afraid of it, or don't understand it or what. I have no idea either, but I am working on changing that attitude in the circle that my voice is heard. Luckily, Hungary is still in the "I don't know anything about this thing, let's just leave it alone" stage as far as legislators are concerned. Also, being a small country and all, it is easy to gain reputation for real experts too, not just self-appointed ones. Let's hope we can use the remaining time to our advantage; after all if they see there are experts in the area doing the legwork, even decision-makers tend to say: OK let it be then, they have obviously thought it over... just remember the bikeshed vs power plant story. In Hungary luckily the Internet is still more of the "power plant" type thing. Now it just depends who the experts are that they listen to. This is where I hope to play some role... > Nevertheless, if the > attitude > DOESEN'T get spread that "I have my gun and I own > this house and I can do whatever the hell I want in it." in the case of > Internet mailservers, then we will eventually have legislated spam, which > would > be far more damaging than a few people that can't subscribe to a mailing > list. I understand your concern and hope that you will not be right in your fears:-) > Yes, I agree with this as well. I've been spamfighting a long, long time > and in fact several > years ago I wrote a series of articles that are up on the web that detail > how to do it. I've come to the understanding that there is only one sure > method of spamfighting that works, and thats content-filtering on the > mailserver. I kill far, far more spam by filtering > mail with words like "cum" or strings like "this is the best work at home" > or "this is not a pyramind scheme" or my favorite "This e-mail sent in > accordance", that > last one is good for a large amount of spam. Yes, I do this for my own account too... but there no problems with that, it only affects me. > But, I also recognize that to > some people the idea of content-filtering is political, and so they won't > content-filter, and so they take > whatever means are available to them to try and block spam. Yep, this is a tricky one as well. And another point where I feel very strongly about the "mere conduit" stuff. Just imagine, what if you start filter at the maillist server. They may say: OK, if you can do this then, say, you could just as well filter for Naci propaganda or child porn. Whereas if you don't do anything, you may effectively claim that it is not your job... it is not easy, perhaps impossible to make these requirements coexist, but maybe I have managed to make understood what I am concerned about... (if sometimes this mail seems really distracted, that's because in the meantime I am trying to do something totally unsupported: building a 4.3-RELEASE on a -CURRENT box. I can tell you that it's quite a job, but I am making very good progress:-) As usual, I was just wondering, not making ex catedra statements... > How can they discriminate between your server and some arbitrary student's > Win95 system? From the mailserver, both of you look exactly the same, you > both communicate via SMTP. OK, this is tricky. I admit this situation is not very common but pisses me off nevertheless:-) So. They basically say: No servers on any machine, please. They don't care if it's win or FreeBSD or what. Instead there are a couple of mail servers that you are supposed to use (that's what I am doing ATM) but with shell access. So in theory, no other machine would be allowed to use SMTP. They even have a firewall with a mail relay that blocks port 25 in both directions and only passes mail through itself in any direction, but only to/from the allowed hosts (mail servers) Quite effective anti-spam measure, of course, but I feel it very limiting at times... <suggestions deleted> Yes, these work (and thanks for the offer) but I do not have bigger problems ATM other than not being able to use send-pr directly. Otherwise, using shell access is OK with me. I wonder however, when will the anti-spam organizations start filtering the free web-based emailers as well... after all, quite a lot of spam originates from the hotmail.com and the other big providers' domains. (Yes, I have already met a free web space provider that did not let me sign on with a hotmail.com address because they said it was unreliable!:-) (Although the real kicker was filtering the whole real.com domain because of the immense amount of spam they send out... bleh.) -- Regards: Szilveszter ADAM Szeged University Szeged Hungary To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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