[Asrg] where the message originated

[Chris Lewis]

der Mouse wrote:

>> Apropos my other posting: anything saying "HELO
>> list.mediresource.com" (except possibly from 209.82.15.228, it's
>> other SPF-permitted IP helos as tempmail.mediresource.com) is spam.

> Um, no, not if it's not bulk.  Want me to telnet to your MX host and
> generate an example manually? :-)

Except for mice in the works ;-)

It may not be bulk, but forgery in the face of the domain owner
asserting otherwise is still undesirable.

>> Certainly, if you're a, say, spam or virus researcher, you might want
>> to get your email flow raw.  Fine.  Just don't expect a commodity ISP
>> to accommodate you at commodity prices.  They simply can't afford the
>> risk to their infrastructure.

> Oh, nonsense.  If that constitutes any risk to their infrastructure,
> they *urgently* need to fix the bugs in question anyway!

Oh, nonsense on your nonsense! ;-)

Perhaps I should have said "network" instead of "infrastructure".  But
the fact remains that an infection on one recipient's machine has
consequences far beyond _that_ machine alone.

The components of an infrastructure do not need to be infected to be
damaged by infections.  Surely you remember slammer?  A handful of
infected desktops took out out entire networks without infecting
anything further.  Simply by bandwidth exhaustion.

Then of course there's the potential reputation loss if something
manages to spam outwards through your MTAs.

Nor does choice of O/S barricade you more than quantitatively.  As
secure as *BSD (for example, for you Seth ;-), it's not immune to going
awry, especially in the face of naive users poking at things they
shouldn't be.