Re: (none)

Mats Bergstrom wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Jan 1995, Name withheld on request wrote:
>
>> wonders to what end remailers are being put by people who are worried
>> about being "sold out".
>
>The fundamental principle here is that an e-mail message is just so
>many bits of 1's and 0's. It can never, in it's own capacity, steal,
>molest or kill. It is therefore not unethical to run a no-log 'fortress
>remailer' and auto-delete ALL complaints, without exception. It might
>not be feasible to do so if one wants to stay out of jail, but hope-
>fully this will change with the rapid increase in country domains
>and the soon-to-come digicash market. Discussions of programming to
>make fortress remailers work and to make them easily exportable to
>African Linux-boxes are interesting. So are discussions of expected
>repercussions on society. Ethical discussions of what is abuse or not
>are better left to the clergy.

Here comes the clergy! :-)

I'm sure that when your hypothetical remailer comes up and I decide to spam
you with your own words (now I wouldn't do that, now would I? ;-), your
sysadmin will be comforted by knowing that it's only ones and zeros filling
his hard disk.  He would be especially comforted if I spammed
postmaster@wherever.you.are rather than your own account in a move to
protect your own anonymity.

Advocating a remailer such as you describe is only possible in a world where
anonymity is considered the supreme good, a goal to achieve no matter how
many other ethical rules we break.  In the real world, however, there will
always be problems with "acceptable use" and "abuse", along with the
additional problems with establishing policy and so on.

From: jalicqui@prairienet.org (Jeff Licquia)

   I'm sure that when your hypothetical remailer comes up and I decide to spam
   you with your own words (now I wouldn't do that, now would I? ;-), your
   sysadmin will be comforted by knowing that it's only ones and zeros filling
   his hard disk.

Why sendmail doesn't have anti-spam protection at this point is beyond
me.  Denial of email service to one user should not deny service to
all others.  I consider broken any email system that crashes a machine
because of a disk partition filling.

When your email provider gave you an account, was there an agreement
as to how much mail you could receive?  If there wasn't, that provider
has no good reason to complain if you receive as much email as
possible.  Merely because some else decided to send it to you does not
relieve a provider who has agreed to deliver all mail of that
obligation.

Moral: If you operate an email service, don't offer unlimited fixed
price email.

   In the real world, however, there will
   always be problems with "acceptable use" and "abuse", along with the
   additional problems with establishing policy and so on.

"Acceptable use" is shorthand for "It's a little rickety, please don't
play hard."  That is, the technical means to limit the consequences of
abuse were not developed, because everyone was willing to play nice.
This doesn't scale, and it will have to be fixed before everyone will
put their home computer directly on the net.

Eric

Eric Hughes says:
> Why sendmail doesn't have anti-spam protection at this point is beyond
> me.  Denial of email service to one user should not deny service to
> all others.  I consider broken any email system that crashes a machine
> because of a disk partition filling.

As a mail administrator for many years, I've never seen a site crash
because of a filling disk partition due to mail overload. I've seen
Sendmail shut itself down temporarily, but thats to be expected. As
for the question of mail overload for one user harming the others, its
a design decision.  The only alternative is to produce quotas for mail
delivery, which at most of the places I run would be a very bad thing.
Strictly speaking, sendmail has nothing to do with local delivery and
isn't in a position to do any of this anyway -- but its easy enough to
change the local mailer (which is not part of sendmail) to do quotas
if you like.

Perry