IP: more on ATTBI / Eudora / SSL

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine)
Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA
Newsgroups: iecc.lists.ip
Date: 6 Apr 2002 14:50:14 -0500
To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
Subject: Re: IP: more on  ATTBI / Eudora / SSL

> Verizon's SMTP blocking is NOT an anti-spam measure, as the company
> claims, but a way to force their users to switch domain hosts ...

I had a somewhat heated exchange with their abuse desk about this very
topic.

It turns out that it actually is an anti-spam measure, albeit one
that's almost completely ineffective and has the not altogether
undesired side-effect of pushing people to sign up for their hosting
service.

VZ is still in the process of merging the former GTE and Bellatlantic
ISPs. They know that the correct thing to do is to allow their
customers to send mail with any return address they want, but and
require mail from outside to be addressed to one of their domains.

But their network is a mess and they're technically unable to tell
which IP addresses are customers and which ones aren't.  (This isn't
quite as trivial as it sounds, since there are shared dialup pools
that are sometimes used by VZ customers and sometimes by others, but
it's a problem that other large ISPs solved years ago.)  So they
slapped on the best band-aid they could devise in five minutes, which
was to force the domain on outgoing mail to be one of theirs.

They tell me that when the mess is cleaned up, they should change the
rules to be reasonable, but I have no idea how long that'll take.

-- 
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner,
http://iecc.com/johnl,
Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail


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