OT: Political Spam - what can you do about it?

[Paul Howarth]

Nifty Hat Mitch wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 08:23:38AM +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:
>>On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 00:02, Nifty Hat Mitch wrote:
>>
>>>Blacklisting for an ISP is not a good thing but it can also be used to
>>>advantage. 
> 
> ....
> 
>>If you follow this policy, the likely result is that all your nets would
>>end up blacklisted anyway. Many of the blacklists would initially list
>>only the "problem" net,...
> 
> 
> You are correct.  However in this case the initial poster was at a
> Public Utility (electricity, phone, and ISP).  I suspect that his
> service obligations as a utility might be different than many service
> providers.

I'm quite happy to accept electricity and phones as being public utilities, 
but surely not ISPs? ISPs in the US have fought against having "Common 
Carrier" status like the telcos and as far as I know have succeeded. So they 
don't have any obligation to serve anyone and don't have the same regulations 
applying to them.

> In almost all 'utility' situations there must be a well documented
> process to turn off service.  There may also be a public hearing of
> changes to varius service agreements.  My thought is that step one is
> to identify and isolate the individuals in a way that quality spam
> detectors will identify the message as possible spam.

Political spam shouldn't be any different to any other type of spam in that 
respect; there will be several ways of identifying it, depending on how the 
spammer goes about the spamming.

> Of interest each day 5-10 fedora messages trigger incoming spam flags
> in part because of the senders domain and IP addresses.

Curious; fedora-list mail all comes from Red Hat servers (and hence their IP 
addresses), so an IP-based flag should be flagging all or none of the 
messages, not just some of them.

> In this case there is a real need to not trip on free speach rights.

Free speech rights have nothing to do with spam. Nobody has the right to come 
into my hone without my permission and spout political nonsense, and the same 
applies to my mailbox. And any ISP that tolerates such spamming should quite 
rightly be listed as spam-supporting.

> As a utility the original poster may need to exercise more caution
> (process) than a business oriented ISP.

I don't see the different. The ISP part of a public utility company is run as 
a business in just the same way as any other ISP.

> As I scanned the site, there was mostly dialup so a number of other
> service (AOL, EarthLink... ) vendor options would be available.
> 
> I would make sure that there is a rich help text that covers 
> dozens of mail readers and describes how to filter mail from
> unwanted senders.   Any complaint should include a pointer to 
> this type of help...

So people receiving spam from this ISP should be given advice on how to filter 
it out rather than how to send useful data to the ISP's abuse department to 
help them boot the spammer? I don't think so...

Paul.