On Wed, 07 May 1997 17:51:37 -0400 Brad Knowles <[log in to unmask]> said:
> Let them flame away. It has been my experience that those who flame
>AOL have never had to deal with a system anywhere *near* 1/10th the size
>of what we have, where a difference in scale typically results in a
>difference in kind.
*sigh* All right. How much SMTP mail did AOL deliver yesterday? L-Soft
made 4,143,362 deliveries yesterday (below average). I imagine that AOL
delivered well over 41,433,620 SMTP messages in that time frame, or you
would not have applied this remark to me.
> If they think they can do any better (yourself included), let them
>come here and prove it.
As a matter of fact, yes, I do think I could do better than your
sendmail-based setup! You would actually keep your current sendmail setup
but route all your outgoing mail through a redundant LSMTP configuration
(ideally a VMS cluster with shared redundant storage and automatic
failover, so that you can blow up any one of the box and continue
uninterrupted). Likewise, these servers could collect your incoming mail
and route it to your unix systems at a pace which you would be able to
control. This would allow you to operate your sendmail systems in the
most efficient manner, with little or no outbound queue, a controlled
number of concurrent processes, etc. So, you would be able to keep
development and custom code on unix where you want it, while dramatically
improving your performance and capacity. Was this a honest invitation or
just a figure of speech? If you are serious, please send us your
technical requirements and we will take it on from there.
> The response I've gotten from AOL users so far has been exceedingly
>positive,
Let me get this straight. You have observed that a lot of spammers used
source routes in the MAIL FROM: field. You then started rejecting this
mail and your users have been very happy. I don't doubt this. What is
going to happen though is that the spammers will get a clue, if not
tomorrow then next week or next month, and they will stop sending mail
with source routed MAIL FROM:, since it does not get there, and instead
use a % hack, the hostname of some random cisco somewhere in the net
(that would work wonders on your sendmail queues!), or why bother, just
MAIL FROM:<>. Your users will get the spam again and you will be back to
the drawing board. So, this is a temporary hack that will buy you some
amount of temporary relief until the spammers get smarter. Why didn't you
say so from the beginning? I still don't agree with the approach, but
this at least makes some measure of sense. Definitely more than just
stating that source routes are intrinsically evil and need to be
exterminated.
> I believe that you'll find beleaguered SysAdmins the world over that
>will feel the same way we do,
I am not disputing your right to refuse to process illegitimate messages.
We do this as well, and frankly I don't know where you got the notion
that I do not have to deal with spammers on a daily basis and have no
idea how mean they can be and so on. I am only disputing the wisdom of
rejecting perfectly legitimate messages (which have 2-3 recipients and
are thus clearly not spam) on the basis that the MAIL FROM: field looks
like what the current version of a popular spam program generates,
especially since there will be a new version of the spam program soon to
correct this "problem".
Eric
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