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Re: test message


At 11:33 am +0100 (GMT) 14/11/01, Piet Beertema wrote:
I had a long conversation with the Italian MEP pushing the opt-out
legislation forward, Marco Cappato ... He said all ISPs must
provide the same system Hotmail has.

 And they all must vote Forza Italia, I suppose?
 Even so this guy provides the basis for a brilliant idea: every
 spammer *must* use a hotmail.com address, so you don't even have
 to look at the Subject to determine the nature of a message: the
 from-address will do, and SMTP has hold of this.
(I grew up in Italy so I speak Italian) I tried to explain to Cappato what could be blocked using SMTP, including the concept of the "NO UCE" SMTP Banner, but halfway into it I realized it was all going way over his head. Cappato says that every day he logs on to his Hotmail account and he sees the system has automagically filtered most of the junk into a convenient junk folder - so he says "what's the problem". Explaining that all of Europe's ISPs and corporate mail servers don't work like that, and that Hotmail has a dedicated group of anti-spam staff doing it is no use - he says all European ISPs must provide the same. Not even explaining that spam-filtering is a delicate balancing act that can occasionally block legitimate emails is any use.

I finally explained to him that the sheer volume of spam doesn't just mean that costs of dealing with it have to be passed on, but that his own Hotmail mailbox has a finite capacity beyond which correspondence from his colleagues, family and friends would start bouncing due to the mailbox already being full of spam. But when I sent him the email telling him that, the email came bouncing back because...

Subject: [Undeliverable mail]: Re: Piccole precisazioni (opt-i
From: MAILER-DAEMON@localhost
To: linford@localhost
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 12:47:39 +0100
Message-Id: <AUTOS.0000644768-644770@localhost

Failed to deliver your message to mcappato@localhost:
SMTP: The letter body is rejected by host
Host 'mc3.law13.hotmail.com' says:
552 Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation

Aaaargh!

--
Steve Linford
The Spamhaus Project
http://www.spamhaus.org




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