From: eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 95 08:07:43 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: (none)
In-Reply-To: <9501172027.AA24378@firefly.prairienet.org>
Message-ID: <199501181607.IAA08201@largo.remailer.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   From: jalicqui@prairienet.org (Jeff Licquia)

   I'm sure that when your hypothetical remailer comes up and I decide to spam
   you with your own words (now I wouldn't do that, now would I? ;-), your
   sysadmin will be comforted by knowing that it's only ones and zeros filling
   his hard disk.

Why sendmail doesn't have anti-spam protection at this point is beyond
me.  Denial of email service to one user should not deny service to
all others.  I consider broken any email system that crashes a machine
because of a disk partition filling.

When your email provider gave you an account, was there an agreement
as to how much mail you could receive?  If there wasn't, that provider
has no good reason to complain if you receive as much email as
possible.  Merely because some else decided to send it to you does not
relieve a provider who has agreed to deliver all mail of that
obligation.

Moral: If you operate an email service, don't offer unlimited fixed
price email.

   In the real world, however, there will
   always be problems with "acceptable use" and "abuse", along with the
   additional problems with establishing policy and so on.

"Acceptable use" is shorthand for "It's a little rickety, please don't
play hard."  That is, the technical means to limit the consequences of
abuse were not developed, because everyone was willing to play nice.
This doesn't scale, and it will have to be fixed before everyone will
put their home computer directly on the net.

Eric