Rattle wrote:
] ] Comcast, the country's largest provider of high-speed
] ] Internet access, has begun blocking a channel frequently
] ] exploited by spammers to send out large volumes of
] ] e-mail, a move that many technologists say was long
] ] overdue and should be matched by other service providers.

] Its email that needs to change, not the Internet. The Internet
] should remain stupid, and treat all ports as equal. It should
] not have ridged rules imposed upon what can flow over it
] because of a problem with an application. Taking away user's
] ability to contact external SMTP server's is a big thing to do
] for a 20% reduction in spam, which the spammers will adapt
] to..

1. I think Comcast said they were going to do it adaptively, based
on the "top 10" hosts each day. There is no reason for a random
user to be sending 10000 messages per day from their cable modem.

Maybe a better policy is "firewall port 25 for people that aren't
well-know/well-behaved mail servers and are sending a suspicious volume of mail."

2. I think its fair to say that the vast majority of spam now
comes from consumer broadband connections, especially bot nets of
compromised windows boxes. This could potentially do more
damage than 20% ... if you could get enough of the big broadband providers onboard

Ultimately, I agree that fixing email is the Right Answer ... but
its a really hard and mostly non-technical problem that will take a long time. These days, I'm thinking the majority of spam abatement will come from a few high-profile prosecutions of spammers and the adoption of some sender-authentication scheme. Installing certs on MXes wouldn't be so bad...