[lug] Getting mail out of the Qwest/MSN mire

[Nate Duehr]

Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> Your statements above reminded me of this idea.  I think it's more valuable
> to try to enforce a strong AUP or similar than to try to track it to a
> particular sending identity.  Spammers already are creating and stealing
> identities for their messages...

The reality of AUP's is that very few really big backbones have the 
money to really enforce them for their large data center customers. 
It's an economic problem.

No one at the backbone level gets paid to remove spam from the large 
bit-streams.  Only the edge-ISP's really have a vested interest in 
removing spam for end-customers.

Many data centers just let their customers spam to their heart's 
content, with their backbone upstreams not caring a whit -- the backbone 
folks get paid by the number of bits pushed.

Want to push spam?  Bring it on, backbone big-bit-pipe providers say. 
We'll look the other way.  We're getting PAID to carry your spam.  Why 
would we ever complain?

That leaves the receiving "edge" as the only people with an economic 
interest in stopping spam.

Nate