Your message dated: Thu, 08 May 1997 12:34:20 EDT
> AOL has decided to unilaterally violate RFC1123, sections 5.2.19,
> which requires accepting source routes, in favor of an
> as-yet-still-draft future standard that permits rejecting these. We
> have already contacted AOL, and they seem to feel that the language in
> RFC1123, section 5.2.6 which permits simply ignoring the source route,
> is insufficient.
>
> We have been informed by Brad Knowles of AOL that they consider
> section 7.5 of draft-ietf-drums-smtpupd-04.txt (still in draft status)
> to be more important than RFC1123, which is in full standard status.
The concept presented in section 7.5 of
draft-ietf-drums-smtpupd-04.txt is older than the Internet itself.
It's been around as long as personal and group property laws have been
in existance.
Specifically, it's based on the "trespass against chattels"
issue, which has been the basis of a number of legal cases against
junkmailers.
Essentially, anyone has the right to protect themselves (or
their property) against abuse from others, especially against being
compelled to bear the brunt of the cost of the act of abuse.
Thus, section 7.5 of draft-ietf-drums-smtpupd-04.txt is merely
publicly recognizing a fact that has been well-known for hundreds of
years, so well known that it previously was not considered necessary
to actually put it down on paper as part of an RFC or draft.
If you refute this position, then I have a bridge to drop on you
that I'd like to force you to pay me for, as well as the resulting
legal fees that would result from the action that your estate would
presumably take against me. ;-)
In this specific case, I regret that a small number of legitimate
mail messages will be caught by this measure we've taken to protect
the AOL mail system, but when you do the cost/benefits analysis of
the value of those few messages to the value of the entire AOL mail
system (and the value of that system to our eight million users),
you'll see that we simply had no choice.
--
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>
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