[lug] Idea for ISPs to limit spam/zombies

[Bear Giles]

Zan Lynx wrote:
> Why not just relay your mail through the approved mail relay?  It's not
> *that* painful and there's nothing inherently virtuous about sending
> email directly to its destination.

Without defending his proposal, that's really not a viable
solution.  Going through comcast, for instance, means that they
have legitimate possession of your mail and can do things to it.
Dark, vile things...

wait, where was I?  Oh yeah, they can rewrite the headers
according to the revised customer agreement you ignored.  You
might legitimately have that domain (or be working from home), but
your mail could be restamped 'From: joe user
<joeuser at comcast.net>'.  It will almost certainly go past some
secret government sniffer exercising some secret search warrant
from some secret court.  Heck, with the right customer service
agreement they could do anything.

On the other hand, I think this is creating a problem where none
exists.  This isn't the dark ages, you can get a virtual host at
Tummy for $25/month and set it up as your own mail/web server for
fun and profit.  You could sell email hosting to your friends and
enemies.

All of my outbound mail is relayed through one of these virtual
servers and that IP address is not flagged as cable modem/DSL.
All of my inbound mail goes to it so I don't have to worry about
server fires when I'm away for the weekend.  I use standard
encryption in both directions, and my mail server uses
opportunistic encryption when possible.  It's not as good as
end-to-end encryption, but it's good enough to get the mail past
the neighbor's kiddie with a packet sniffer.

Bear