On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, David Sheryn wrote:
> Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 10:34:50 +0000 (GMT)
> From: David Sheryn <D.H.Sheryn@???>
> To: Philip Hazel <ph10@???>
> Cc: "Andrew V. Kovalev" <avk@???>, djc@???,
> david@???, jhenders@???, exim-users@???
> Subject: Re: [EXIM] Regular expressions for filtering.
>
> On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, Philip Hazel wrote:
>
> > Subject: Re: [EXIM] Regular expressions for filtering.
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, Andrew V. Kovalev wrote:
> >
> > > Hmm.. I am to lazy now to grep RFCs 8xx but it seems to me that any host on
> > > internet that wants to send mail has a right to connect to appropriate MX
> > > host..
> >
> > Not if the supplier of the Internet connection says "you may not". For
> > example, we do not permit students in their college rooms to send SMTP
> > to arbitrary hosts (and we back this up with router blocks). That is the
> > condition on which we permit them to connect to our network.
>
> Ditto. We do the same for our student accommodation. In general, I'm in
> agreement with Phil on this one. However...
>
> > It would stop a lot of spam if ISPs put something similar in their
> > contracts, and also blocked SMTP from dialup lines, except to their
> > servers. I think some do do this.
>
> This is purely from the administrator/anti-spam angle.
>
> If my only access to email was from my *nix box at home, I'd want a
> water-tight SLA from my ISP covering delivery times, before I'd be happy with
> them _forcing_ me to go via their relays. And we all know how easy that would
> be to do... (if my box was doing deliveries direct, at least *I* would know
> what was going on; and could decide how long I wanted to stay online and pay
> for. But then again, I, and I suspect most people on this list, are the
> exceptions).
I'm not sure about other ISP's, but our _static_ IP dialup connections
are not restricted to our relays. And I'm assuming in most cases anyone
with a unix box would want a static if they were handling their own
email. Its only the dynamic dialups that are restricted from speaking
to SMTP ports outside our network.
> Plenty of my friends are connected to ISPs where it takes _days_ for mail to
> rumble around inside their systems (yes, I know, in these days of market
> driven economics, change your ISP...)
Again, I don't know about others, but most of our inbound mail is
delivered within minutes of receipt, and outbound mail is delivered to
the appropriate MX host as long as it/they are accepting connections
within the same time frame. The only time outbound mail is delayed is
when the MX hosts for the destination are unreachable or are not
accepting connections. (Which basically means mail for aol.com,
hotmail.com, juno.com, etc gets delayed)
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