Re: MAPS disabling free access

[Anders Andersson <]

furio ercolessi furio+as@localhost wrote:
>This is clearly your decision, however note that educational
>institutions pay one order of magnitude less than commercial
>institutions: http://mail-abuse.org/feestructure.html .
>Covering 10000 users with RBL+ would cost your university $175/year.

Thank you for digging up the fees for us.  When I tried accessing
their page last week, I couldn't get through.  Maybe it was a
temporary "for sale" stampede on MAPS premises. ;-)

I should clarify that I have no objection against paying for the
service, and we may very well decide to subscribe.  My concern is
instead about the change in blocking list access, meaning that my
contributions in terms of IP address _nominations_ will probably
dry up, as I can't justify giving my labour away to a proprietary
service.  We'd move from being a contributing subscriber to being
a paying subscriber.  If everybody did that, how would MAPS go
about locating all those open relays they want to tell us about?

Nominating an open relay is still relatively easy.  Consider the
work required on my part to nominate a spammer for the MAPS RBL,
and you may see my financial incentive run down the drain.  It's
similar to Tom Sawyer having other kids pay for the pleasure of
painting his aunt's fence for him.  For how long will MAPS be able
to pull that stunt off?

<URL:http://www.freeessay.com/ap/english/tomsawyer.shtml>
<URL:http://www.dhv-speyer.de/rei/PUBLICA/engl/ENDUSER.HTM>
<URL:http://dong-gu.ms.kr/cathy/lp3-6.htm>

(Side note: When I searched Alta Vista for Tom Sawyer pointers
and added the keyword "spam", I was presented with a "Featured
Site" link to a Doubleclick ad saying "Extract your own targeted
e-mail lists from tons of categories.  Go where no other spider
can!  No. 1 targeted e-mail extractor!"  Can I conclude that Alta
Vista knowingly receives money for advertising spamtools?)

I'm concerned that members of the anti-spam-wg@localhost mailing
list won't feel compelled to unsubscribe from it due to excessive
discussions on subjects of limited interest.  If anybody knows of
a mailing list better suited to discussing blacklisting services,
I would be grateful for a pointer to it.  Until that time, I'll
take it that a majority of list members considers this subject to
be well within the scope of the anti-spam working group (thanks to
Jan Meijer for making the point), not merely within their personal
field of interest.  However, I don't mind being on several mailing
lists, should that eventually be required.

--
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University
Paper Mail: Box 325, S-751 05 UPPSALA, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 4713170   EMail: andersa@localhost