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

Blacklisting them publically.

[strredwolf]

For every listing backed by proof, post a large ad in the New York Times saying "THIS ISP SUPPORTS SPAMMERS" with the proof behind it. Enforce the PR leverage.

Re:The problem

[scooby111]

It's not even necessarily the ISP. I know that my mail servers aren't being used by spammers because I monitor them carefully. We have corporate customers that run their own email servers on our IP blocks that are overrun. We try to work with them to close down open relays or even suspend accounts when they seem unwilling or unable to stop spamming, but there's only so much we are able or willing to do to shut down a clueless netadmin's mail server.

In the end, they'll go somewhere else to spam and we'll lose the revenue.