[lug] SMTP delivery: No route to host

[Nate Duehr]

On Wed, 2002-11-27 at 00:08, Joseph McDonald wrote:

> > Why aren't the largest ISP's lobbying for stricter laws?  Because
> > they're using spam filters as MARKETING FODDER.  "Use
> > AOL/Earthlink/Idiots-R-Us!  We'll protect you from the big bad
> > Internet!"
> 
> You seem to contradict several of your own asertions in the preceeding
> paragraphs however this last paragraph is simply ridiculous. SPAM is a 
> huge problem for network service providers. They have customer support 
> groups dedicated to the investigation of network abuse and SPAM tops
> that list. The employees of network service providers are also
> overwhelmed with SPAM. The costs that ISP's incur as a result of mail
> abuse outweigh any benifits that so called 'MARKETING FODDER' would
> produce by perhaps one hundred to one, or more. 

Totally disagree. 

Have you e-mailed an abuse account lately?   Postmaster?  HA!  Right...
postmaster at aol.com is read and answered by a live body... surrrrre. 

There are VERY few that have a real human being ever reading, let alone
TRULY investigating complaints.  Only smaller ISP's and reputable ones
like some of the folks here on this list even bother.  The larger the
company, the less likely they're even going to notice spammers in the
general noise level of a busy production environment.  

Add on to this that, at least in my personal experience, I have direct
knowledge of at least national ISP that only has one person doing abuse
complaints for multiple Class B address ranges and... well... I just
don't buy your story that the world is peachy-keen and wonderful and
that admins are "working hard" on the problem.  Unless some massive
spammer hammers the incoming mail spool, or pushes CPU load so high (due
to the spam filters) most huge ISP's won't even notice.  Or care very
much, in my experience.

IMHO, the larger ISP's have given up on worrying about anything but
system-crushing spam long ago, and now use their "new, fancy, neat-o"
spam filters as a marketing tool to gather new (uneducated) users to
their networks while ignoring the mail in their postmaster and abuse
accounts.

Sorry that may sound harsh, but that's just my personal experience.

Admins tied up doing abuse investigations or admins working on spam
filters?  Which one can you BILL for?  

The idea of "whole customer service groups" answering spam complaints is
laughable... yes... a group of people are paid just over minimum wage,
told they'll have a future in system administration and told to answer
the abuse at bigisp.com stuff that gets past the auto-responders.  That's
about it.  The smart ones claw their way away from the abuse at bigisp.com
desk and go on to other things...

-- 
Nate Duehr, WY0X  (AIM: BigNateCO)
nate at natetech.com