ISP Responsibility in Fight Against Spam

netpulse writes "Over at CircleID, John Levine shares a letter by Carl Hutzler, AOL Postmaster and Director, blaming irresponsible ISPs as key part of the problem in the long-term fight against spam. Hutzler says: "Spam is a completely solvable problem. And it does not take finding every Richter, Jaynes, Bridger, etc to do it (although it certainly is part of the solution). In fact it does not take email identity technologies either (although these are certainly needed and part of the solution). The solution is getting messaging providers to take responsibility for their lame email systems that they set up without much thought and continue to not care much about when they become overrun by spammers. This is just security and every admin/network operator has to deal with it. We just have a lot of providers not bothering to care.' To which John Levine adds: 'What do we have to do to persuade networks that dealing with their own spam problem, even at significant short term cost, is better for the net and themselves than limping along as we do now?'"

Comments

AOL's spam policy is unreasonable

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On the surface, AOL looks like the good guys here. However, their draconian spam policy can be as harmful as the span it's trying to prevent.

Here's how it works: AOL receives N complaints calling something spam after users click on the "mark this as spam" button. So AOL looks at the previous link in the received-from chain and blocks that entire network.

Sounds good right? Wrong.

Say Joe User works at my company part-time from home. Instead of another pop account, he has a forwarding address with our company that forwards to his AOL account. Joe gets spam, and reports it to AOL. AOL looks to see who sent it, sees my company in the "received-from" chain, and blocks not only us, but every other company hosted with our ISP. Thousands of legitimate emails now can't get to AOL addresses.

It gets worse. Many people use the "spam" button like the "delete" key to get rid of stuff they just don't want right now. AOL doesn't educate its users to realize that reporting something as spam has real consequences, and so people mark real email they requested as spam just because it's easier than deleting around it.

Our fabulous domain host FutureQuest has had to ban forwarding to AOL addresses as a result. AOL has been completely unreasonable in accepting any responsibility for intelligent spam blocking, and their users and legitimate businesses are suffering.

At least they're trying, but they're far from the good guys here.