Your message dated: Thu, 08 May 1997 18:46:40 EDT

> These sample people would probably also not notice if you started denying
> mail from, say, all of Compuserve. But you would never do that, would you?

    If we determined that CompuServe was being used as a relay
point for junkmail, and had exhausted all other avenues of recourse
(we do have direct phone and email contacts over there), then yes --
we would refuse to accept any and all SMTP connections from them.

    Hell, we've been within a hairs-breadth of putting them in a
AOL-wide router filter before, and only at the last minute did we
get any positive response from them.


    On the same basis as I gave before (protecting the system
against abuse, and preventing others from compelling us to allow
them to abuse our system), we'll do *whatever* it takes.  If that
means we cut off all email from CompuServe, so be it.  I expect
them to act the same way towards us.

    However, that said, I find it highly unlikely that they would
be so unresponsive so as to force us to take that kind of action.
The community of Internet mail professionals at the various large
service providers is too tightly knit a community for that.


    If nothing else, the cost of forcing us to take that kind of
action is so prohibitively high that even the most pointy-haired
management realizes that they have to fix the problem before we're
required to stop accepting any mail from them whatsoever.

> Sure, all of us will eventually get around to "fixing" our mailers. But some
> of us are running commercial software, and it takes time to get new releases
> from vendors...

    I've been kept up fifty-six hours straight in the past, trying to
breathe life back into a dead email system, as a result of various
different types of problems inflicted upon me by outside influences.

    I've implemented the best solution I can find for the overall
problem, and I don't see why I should be required to continue to
risk the very existance of the AOL mail system (and spend untold
millions of dollars) trying to bend over backwards to accomodate
a few sites that can't themselves be put out enough to put in that
same kind of effort to fix their systems.


    You're now in essentially the same boat as users of Microsoft
Exchange, various products based on Novell Netware, etc....  You have
to upgrade your systems, if you want to talk to the AOL mail system.

    We can't help you do that any more than we can help other sites
upgrade their copies of Microsoft Exchange.

--
Brad Knowles                                MIME/PGP: [log in to unmask]
    Senior Unix Administrator              <http://www.his.com/~brad/>
<http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE38CCEF1>