Israeli ISP blocking outgoing SMTP

[Aviram Jenik]

Noam didn't say blocking port 25 for everyone is a good thing or that he likes 
it - just that this is what ISPs in Europe and the US are doing that to fight 
spam.

What Noam said is that ISPs have a responsibility to prevent spam being sent 
from their hosts. He also said that blacklists may not be the smartest thing 
in the world, but they are deployed and in use - once that's done it's the 
ISPs responsibility for its users to not be listed. It is unfortunate ISPs 
choose blocking port 25 as the easy way to do that, but like I said it's the 
current common practice.


By the way - just to set the Linux-IL record straight - Imri has been 
extremely helpful to us in several "abuse" cases we contacted him with. It 
wasn't necessary for him to do that (that's what the abuse desk is for) but 
he did it anyway, and I applaud him for that.

But that doesn't mean we don't have our different PoVs...


Hag Sameach.

- Aviram



On Tuesday 07 April 2009 02:05:15 Imri Zvik wrote:
> It was advocated on this mailing list, not so long ago, by someone from
> your management team :)
>
> I opposed this method then, and I still think it is a bad idea, even
> though it is very effective.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-il-bounces at cs.huji.ac.il
> [mailto:linux-il-bounces at cs.huji.ac.il] On Behalf Of Aviram Jenik
> Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 10:42 PM
> To: linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il; ronys at acm.org
> Subject: Re: Israeli ISP blocking outgoing SMTP
>
> On Monday 06 April 2009 10:55:40 ronys wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > For the last few days, an ISP who shall remain nameless (but who's
>
> name in
>
> > octal is equal to 11) has decided to block outgoing SMTP connections
>
> to
>
> > servers abroad. They've done this unilaterally, without notifying
> > customers, and, for the first couple of calls to support, without
>
> admitting
>
> > anything beyond "there's a problem, we're working on it".
>
> Blocking port 25 for broadband users is now considered common practice,
> and is
> actually advocated by many spam fighting organizations. I personally
> think
> it's stupid and goes against everything the Internet is about, but
> strangely
> enough I wasn't consulted when that decision was made. These are also
> the
> guys that think blacklists are a good idea.
>
> But as far as it goes to making ISPs change their ways, it will most
> likely be
> the other way around - Israeli ISPs are just catching up to the
> unfortunate
> global standard.
>
> On the bright side, doing that may get them removed from several
> blacklists
> (did I mention how stupid I thought blacklists were?)
>
> > 	Rony
>
> - Aviram
>
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