Re: Cisco 2611 as a firewall?

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Thomas O'Dowd (tom@example.com) wrote:

> Hmmm. Actually, I like to run my own mailserver on my home machine and
> let that do all the work for me. I'm not talking about relaying 

And your objection to using your ISP's SMTP as a smarthost is?
I do that and it works just fine.  

> Does my argument not count?

If smarthosts didn't exist, maybe.  I run a local outgoing smtp
too, and smarthost it through GOL's servers.  It may add a few
seconds to the time it takes for mail to get around the
world, but in the scheme of things, that's not a big problem :-)


> > You'll find it more and more difficult to get an ISP that doesn't
> > filter outbound port 25 on their dial-up pools; many of us do it and
> > more get onboard all the time. 
> 
> Sad world :(

I wish as much as anyone else that it was still perfectly safe to
run an open relay, but that Internet died a long time ago.


> Yeah, I thought that the fines are hard to get out of them :( Wouldn't
> some sort of ban list between ISPs work?

It would be really difficult to administer, and you can count
on it that some of the spammers would make it a point to sue
anyone who maintained such a list.  Even if they lost,
it would be both costly and a PITA for the maintainers.
I understand that more than a few spammers also practice credit
card and identify fraud, so the victim ISP never even gets
the $10 or whatever they'd charge for a month's service :-(

For all the attention crackers and script kiddies get, I bet the
damage done by spammers by the amount of network resources they
consume and the amount of time and energy ISPs, companies, and
everyday end users spend defending against spam probably easily 
passes them by on the dollar value of damage done.  

Jonathan