Post by daestromPost by Ben BradleyPost by daestromI don't think such a document exists.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2505.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2635.txt
Well, all due respect to the authors of RFC2635, but I don't think they have
any legal point (they even admit it is more of an ethical issue [pg 3]).
Unlike most RFC's that I've read (and that's a few), the front half of this
reads more like an op-ed piece than a formally crafted document describing a
protocol or standard. And the opinion the authors have is obvious from the
title. But yes, I took the time to read the whole thing, thanks for the
link.
They both state one of the major concerns is the real cost people pay for
connect time. While this may have been true in 1999, I wonder if it is
still true today. Many, many ISP's have flat rates now.
The claim that spammers are using other private equipment may be true, but
it is *no different* than telemarketing. An automated dialer playing a
voice recording to anyone who answers the phone is much the same as a mass
spamming. The telemarketer is using *my* phone, and my phone companies
central office. And most likely using a couple of long-lines that don't
belong to them either. This is another case of 'private' equipment that is
deliberately open to public use. How can the backbone providers get upset
if they voluntarily open their equipment for public use and the public
starts using it?
If telemarketing is allowed (although we all hate it), then what is
different from telemarketing and spam (if it is from a legitimate marketer
with legitimate headers)??
One difference is in quantity. Telemarketing companies have to pay
live operators to talk on the phone. Telemarketing autodialers have
existed for at least 25 years. About 15 to 20 years ago many states in
the USA outlawed them, or at least required that a live operator
respond to an answered line with "We have this Really, Really
Important message for you. Please press 1 to hear it or 2 to hang up."
So the amount of telemarketing done is limited (though not nearly as
limited as we wish it were) by the need to have a live person talk at
every call.
Post by daestromWRT the poor ISP whose open-relay mail server is crashed by a large volume
of spam, aren't they asking for it by being an open-relay??
Yes, absolutely. It's my understanding that the 'open relay' used
to be a standard part of Internet email protocol, for now-obsolete
technical reasons. Though that's ancient history, there are still a
lot of open relays out there, and even a lot of currently shipped
software is configured as an open relay by default.
But there's also the problem of an ISP receiving a hugh volume of
spam in a short period of time (all addressed to its customers rather
than being relayed somewhere else), and its mail server gets filled
up, and at that point no one can receive ANY email until the problem
is cleared up. This has happened, people not receiving their email
because of a spam run, and it's been in the news. You could argue that
the ISP needs to scale its servers up large enough so this won't
happen, but how big should the disk space be? Five times the normal
volume of email? One hundred times?
Post by daestromSeems like that
is akin to putting your car on a city street with the doors open and the
keys in ignition, *and* posting a sign that says 'use me'. Open-relays are
sought out by spammers simply because they can find them and their free.
Yes, and there are many (millions?) of servers online, and many of
them run older software, or even newer software where the default is
to be an open relay. Configuration to disable this is not difficult,
and there's free documentation for doing this online (and if that's
not good enough, there are people on SPAM-L who will help), but most
ofteh the problem is that the operator doesn't know that it needs to
be done.
For the problem of relayed spam, once an open relay is detected, it
can be added to a list that you can use to block all messages from
that relay. Such a list operates at http://ordb.org/ and many
companies use such lists (their Who Is Using ORDB page lists Apple
Computer among many others).
Post by daestromWhile it's true many spammers like them to hide their tracks, I'm more
concerned here about blocking all unsolicited email.
I can see the interest in blocking, but I'm also interested in
stopping it to begin with. Blocking spam stops you from receiving it,
but it still travels along the Net backbone and takes up bandwidth
until it hits your filter.
Post by daestromNow, I *don't* feel it is correct for a spammer to spoof reply-to, etc... to
point to some poor AOL account so they don't have to deal with the bounce
unwanted solicitations.
Of course not...
Post by daestromBut a *legitimate* marketer would want to be easily
contacted, and they are paying for their network connection. These folks
are the ones who can be likened to telemarketing. They are using common
resources that are available for public use. They would be censored if all
unsolicted email were outlawed.
So how many examples of "legitimate" marketers sending unsolicited
email have you seen? I've seen and heard of a (very) few. Usually one
of two things happens when they get a call from their ISP giving them
a second chance or their account/website they advertised is deleted:
They decide that sending unsolicited email is a bad idea and the never
do it again.
Or, they decide they SHOULD be allowed to send unsolicited email
regardless of what their ISP or anyone says, so they find
"bulletproof" hosting for their website, forge From: addresses, use
open relays, send spam using stolen AOL accounts, etc.
Post by daestromAnd I feel that repeated advertisements of no relavance to newsgroups (such
as fdfh34) is bogus. I'm not trying to defend *that* in any way.
Post by Ben BradleyThose who send third-class mail pay for page layout or do it
themselves, buy and use their own paper and ink, then pay what the
postal service charges for third-class mail.
But the postal costs are spread over not just the marketer's fee. We all
pay increased postage for first-class mail when the post office has to raise
their rates. This is a case of marketers driving up the costs of mail for
the entire public. Isn't this the same as spammers using publicly open
internet backbone??
Actually, the arguments I've heard are that bulk postal mail
actually subsidizes first-class mail, so that if there were no bulk
mail, first-class mail would cost more.
Post by daestromPost by Ben BradleyEmail is NOT free, it's "free with $19.95/month Internet access".
Usenet and web access are likewise "free" with whatever you pay to
connect to the Internet. Industry figures from a few years ago
estimated that about two dollars of that monthly fee is used to handle
the problems caused by spam. We DO pay for spam - it may not appear
that it costs anything because it is a hidden cost.
And incoming telephone service is not free, it costs $24.95/month (or
whatever your rate is).
The more I read your messages, the more I want to outlaw
telemarketing... oh, BTW, as President Bush said the other day:
http://donotcall.gov
Post by daestromBut my point is that unsolicited mail doesn't
*increase* my costs directly. It only increases costs indirectly by adding
to the total bandwidth/mailbox-size.
It also increases costs in that ISP's have to pay one or more
persons to work at abuse desks and handle complaints and reports of
spammers from the ISP, verifying the info, and deleting the spammers'
accounts. If spammers continue after the ISP has been notified of
them, the ISP may be added to blocking lists by other ISP's, and some
people won't be able to send you email.
Post by daestromBut I defy anyone to quantify this.
It IS hard to quantify, but there are many indirect costs to spam.
Post by daestromAnd if some people use the publicly accessable portions of the net to
transmit video and audio, they increase the bandwidth usage too. I don't
use these forms so for me the cost of this increased bandwidth is being
'forced' on me 'unsolicited'. I don't want it, but I'm paying my share in
increased ISP costs just like everyone else. I don't want to spam anyone,
but I'm paying my share in increased costs for this too. Why single out the
unsolicited marketer and not MSNBC.com that is multicasting to my ISP's
server for someone else to watch a (IMO worthless) video?
Post by Ben BradleyYou're confusing commercial with unsolicited. Spam is a problem of
unsolicited email, not of commercial email. Not all commercial email
is unsolicited (the Powells newsletter is such an example).
No, I was using 'commercial' in the sense that an account setup specifically
for mass mailings. Not 'commercial' as in some business use for the normal
conduct of their trade. I'm specifically thinking of honest business owners
that are using unsolicited mail to market a legal, possibly desireable
product/service (for example, an internet mortgage company).
While you're at it, you could think of honest preachers who have
important things they want to tell you about the Word of God, and then
there may be an email solicitation to vote for an, ahem, honest
politician...
Post by daestromPost by Ben BradleyThe problem with "unsolicited" is that it can result in every email
address receiving hundreds of messages a day (limited mainly by how
much email servers can hold), and there's no way to "unsubscribe" from
it.
Just like tele-marketers placing thousands upon thousands of phone calls a
day??
Telemarketers would make tens of millions of calls a day if they
were allowed to use fully automated equipment.
Post by daestromTelephone companies avoid a problem by not storing much from the
phone call or limiting the voice-mail box size.
No, governments avoid the problem by requiring by law that a live
operator be on the other end of the line. Voice mail box size is not a
limiting factor, it is a problem in that it could fill up with
telemarketing messages, and people you WANT to hear from can't leave
you a message.
Post by daestromSome ISP's also limit the
individuals mailbox size.
Precisely, and if your mailbox fills up (with, let's say, spam),
anyone else who sends you email will get a bounce if it's sent after
the mailbox fills up but before you retrieve your email.
Post by daestromThe trouble with this idea is, 'how do I know if I want to receive your
email if I've never seen it?' The mass-marketer could normally pay for an
address list of people who've shown interest in similar products or belong
to a likely demographic.
I know that I don't want to receive an unsolicited email, even if
it advertises a product I want to buy.
I want to buy new shoes. I want to buy tires for my car. I want to
buy toothpaste. I DO NOT want to receive email advertising these
things, and I will not buy anything in response to an unsolicited
email (the Boulder Pledge).
You may want to receive such emails, and below I describe how you
can do so. And if you do ask to receive them, then they're not
unsolicited, are they?
There are legitimate ways of sending to people who have asked for
emails containing targeted marketing information. ISTR that
postmasterdirect is a (mostly) legitimate organization that does this
sort of thing. See http://www.postmasterdirect.com
Post by daestromBut if they use that to email me about a new
product, it *is* technically 'unsolicited', yet I may in fact be interested
in hearing about it. This great "information superhighway" would not be
able to connect us up if his 'unsolicited mailing' is outlawed.
Sure it would. He can buy banner ads on yahoo. He can put up a
website using the keywords about his product, and submit the website
to Yahoo, Google, and many other search engines.
Even more, he can have an area on his website for "Enter your email
address to receive sales flyers by email" [and have it go through a
confirmation process so no one can add someone else's email to the
list], and so you can get your email on the marketer's products.
Post by daestromPost by Ben BradleyIf spammers were charged for the bandwidth they use, most of them
would go bankrupt.
But you have to decide 'which' bandwidth you mean. Obviously many of them
*do* pay for an internet connection that gives them the bandwidth to send
their mail at least to an SMTP server. As their mail diffuses to the
various recepiants, it fans out to smaller and smaller amounts.
Actually, the way an SMTP server works, you can send it hundreds
(the exact number varies with configuration) of addresses for the
"To:" "CC:" or "BCC:" fields, and ONE copy of the body of the message,
and tell it to send. So the output bandwidth of the abused open relay
is hundreds of times what the spammer is using to connect to the
internet.
I'm talking about the output bandwidth of the server.
Post by daestromSounds a
lot like telemarketer paying for a 'boiler room' full of watts lines (or
whatever they use these days) to reach out across america. Then it fans out
to long-lines and central offices that they are *not* paying, and finally
into my house onto the phone *I* bought from Wal-Mart.
I just don't see the difference between unsoliced email, telemarketers and
junk mail. Yes, unsolicited email amplifies the issue, but just because its
cheaper for the marketer, it should be outlawed??
Now, is unsolicited email really what takes up all the bandwidth on the
backbone? The RFC 2635 [pg 4] only says, "...numbers on the volume and rate
of increase of spam are not easy to find..." At most it seems like a
problem for sendmail and mailbox storage. Given hard disk technology, one
might argue that the amount of storage available for a given price has grown
as fast, or faster than unsolicited email :-)
Yes, as hardware gets cheaper, more of the money goes to paying the
salaries of those who do the upgrades to keep spam from overwhelming
the systems.
Post by daestromOne of my pet arguments at work is the co-worker that listens to the 'radio'
over the internet. Although directed towards his machine, the multi-cast
broadcast affects everyone's bandwidth. Residential ISP's let this go on
all the time. They install more and more fiber and hardware to handle
things like this, yet we hear complaints that bandwidth is being chewed up
by ascii/hmtl spam. non-sequitor.
But the people getting the high-bandwidth net transmissions have
requested them, AND they can stop them at any time. You may be able to
block/filter the spam being sent to your inbox, but that doesn't stop
the bandwidth from being wasted.
Post by daestromsigh... maybe it's just easy to blame something everyone hates ;-)
Post by Ben BradleyEmail is a less-than-perfectly-reliable medium, and spam is by far
the largest contributor to its unreliability.
Well that's certainly true. I saw a story the other day about someone
trying to sue their ISP because they didn't receive an important email and
claim they suffered all sorts of damages. Don't people understand the terms
of use? H___, even the USPS claims no responsibility for lost snail-mail,
your only recourse with them is registered mail or insurance.
daestrom