Re: RBL & Broadband (WAS: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt?)

[Paul Vixie <vixie () vix com>]

> ...  If you do not filter spamers, how do you stop them?  If you do 
> filter spamers, how to do stop from occasionally hurting people in 
> Christopher's situation?  I dunno.  Suggestions?

That depends.  If you want to filter abusive senders you have a different
problem than if you want to filter abusive traffic.  Abusive senders have
ways of avoiding your filters; abusive traffic has other ways.  Generally
a high volume receiver (such as a busy e-commerce web site) has no way to
differentiate an attack from a bump in traffic load.  Whereas the number
of possible sources of abuse ("launch points") is finite.  These sources
are not necessarily evil but from the reciever's point of view there's not
a lot of difference between evil and laziness on the part of a source-owner.

In the specific case of e-mail abuse ("spam"), has everybody checked out 
http://www.rhyolite.com/dcc/ yet?  There ARE ways to raise the bar on the
sender's pattern selections, at least for e-mail.