Re: Nomination for promotion to "Proposed Standard"

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>]

In message <285778337.1067267718@[192.168.1.49]>, Harald Tveit Alvestrand write
s:

>> More generally, I think the question we all need to keep in the back of
>> our
>> minds is the very real possibility of widespread deployment of even more
>> draconian schemes. For example, what if all the major service providers
>> were to
>> enact schemes similar to the one AT&T used recently?
>
>Steve Bellovin was on the phone about that one in Chicago..... even ONE 
>large service provider doing this worries me significantly; several of them 
>doing the same thing with different lists worries me even more.
>
>One opportunity/danger of the RMX schemes is that it could be the way to 
>make an AT&T-style block feasible - "if you don't do this, you don't get to 
>send us mail". 

To clarify: this was an ill-thought-out emergency response,  While I 
wouldn't be surprised if something like it was being considered for the 
long term, this move was prompted by what was seen as a business 
emergency.  A sudden massive overload of spam (and bounce messages from 
joe job spam) flooded the gateways to the point that business-critical 
email couldn't get through.  The whitelist was an attempt to block that 
so that major customers could reach us.  Also note that AT&T was not 
wearing its service provider hat when it pulled the stunt; it was the 
corporate gateawys, not the ISP function, that was affected.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb