Open Relays, Free Speech, and Virus Propagation

sirsnork writes: "There is a story about John Gilmore running an open relay that is being used by a virus to propagate running over at Newsbytes. His defence? He wants his friends to be able to send email through his server from whereever they are. You'd think he'd know better." Gilmore has been skirmishing with Verio for some time over his open mail relay. Is it a good thing because it promotes the free flow of information? Is it bad for promoting the free flow of spam? Do the ethics change because someone writes a virus that uses the server to propagate? Interesting questions.

Comments

Re:Jackass

[tcr]

I agree.

But weird how the article said Gilmore, a life member of the Libertarian party, has accused Verio of censorship and said he configured the mail server to accept and forward e-mail from anyone in part so that friends could use it while traveling around the world.
(Emphasis mine).

Seems to imply there are other motives...

Let him be free.

[www.sorehands.com]

Allow him to keep an open relay. But also require that he would be liable responsible for ALL spam that passes through his server.

That means that he would have to be paying out large amounts of money to anyone who is a victim of spam through his server.

It is interesting to know that a while back, Verio was scraping the register.com database to spam people who had registered with register.com

Maybe I'm missing something...

[SpookComix]

...by my mail server is not and open relay, effectively blocks Spam, and requires authentication to send through, but I can send email from anywhere I get an Internet connection. I just have to provide my username and password.

Is that too much of him to ask of his users? Or is he just unaware of how and what to do?

Clue me in, folks.

--SC

John Gilmore is lying

[hoggoth]

Come on people! John Gilmore is going on and on about his freedom of speech and how he is running a mail relay for his friends.

He is lying.

If he really wanted to run a mail relay for his friends you could authenicate them on a properly administered CLOSED mail relay. Here are a few ways to do this:
POP before SMTP authentication
SMTP authentication
SSH accounts for his friends
Webmail accounts

And John Gilmore certainly knows these and other methods of properly administering his mail server.
I doubt he is running a spam relay for profit, I think he is just trying to stubbornly make some minor point of personal philosophy, and hiding it with his words.