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

I see his point though...

[Kintanon]

My boss doesn't want to change his SMTP server every time he is connected to a different network (about 5 times per day) nor does he want to have to worry about having 5 different connections set up (one for each network even though he is using the same e-mail address for all of them) and he travels out of state and out of country a lot, which adds yet another set of random SMTP servers he would have to deal with.
My problem is that SMTP has no authentication that I can find that would allow me to let him use our SMTP server from wherever he was, so I found a list of open relays and changed his SMTP server to use that. I wish there were a better technical solution, but I haven't been able to find one so far... If anyone has a suggestion I'd be happy to hear it, but until then Open Relays have a place in the world in my opinion.

Kintanon

SMTP Authentication

[MicroBerto]

Yeah, I guess having his friends and server use some form of SMTP authentication from anywhere would be too hard. What a dipshit.