At 11:23 am +0000 2004/03/05, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 10:05:02AM -0800, Fred Viles wrote:
>> On 4 Mar 2004 at 9:52, James P. Roberts wrote about
>> | Would it make sense to apply a 30 second-ish delay to every incoming
>> | connection, simply to weed out the virii? Since any legit MTA
>>should accept
> ^^^^^ viruses
>> | such a delay without incident, and most virii engines would give up.
> ^^^^^ virus
>> No, I think that would be very anti-social behavior. Imagine if
>> everyone did it - what would happen to the Internet's email
>> infrastructure?
>
>I think you misunderstand the fundamental point of SMTP and unreliable
>connections.
>
>I don't believe it to be anti-social behaviour, and believe in causing
>deliberate command-response penalties based on host-history and current
>behaviour. I am quite happy for others to do the same to hosts that I
>run.
You have cut out the rest of his though that went like:
At 10:05 am -0800 2004/03/04, Fred Viles wrote:
>IMO, artificial delays should be introduced into the SMTP session
>*only* if there is already good reason to suspect that the sender is
>not legitimate. Then the benefit outweighs the infrastructure cost
>(IMHO).
so he appears to agree with your last paragraph above.
you also wrote:
>The point is that the people it seriously impacts are those hosts who are
>sending out large amounts of mail to hosts which implement this kind of
>policy, not the average mail.
his point was against a generalised application of such a delay, that
clearly would affect the average mail. I think his point is valid if
we can consider as anti-social any behaviour that would cause
inconvenience if generalised.
Giuliano
