spam control again

[josephc at etards.net]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Derek Martin wrote:

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> On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 10:41:33AM -0400, josephc at etards.net wrote:
> > I understand people are upset over SPAM, and the majority of SPAM
> > prevention should not be done on the last mile. But people need to
> > complain to their ISP, not their congressman.
> 
> As has already been touched upon several times by several different
> people, your ISP can't solve the problem.  They are incapable.  Not
> possible.  They would have to make a judgement call about what is and
> what is not spam, and they can not possibly make that decision
> acceptably for all users.  No matter what they do, large quantities of
> their users will complain.  So the right thing for them to do,
> unfortunately, is to leave spam control up to the user.
> 

Being the sysadmin for an ISP, albeit small, I respectfully disagree. We 
have several thousand users and within the last 12 months took a very 
active approach to reducing the amount of SPAM that makes it into our 
users mail box. After the initial rollout, the upkeep has been minimal and 
issues such as false positives have been practically non-existant. We also 
enacted strict guidleines for our customers to make sure they did not 
originate SPAM themselves, intentionally or otherwise.

-joe