How to be right for the wrong reasons

John Gilmore is what many of us consider a "hero". Longtime technical guy, very strong lover of freedom, was in a cover feature of the August 2003 issue of Reason Magazine making the case for not requiring photo ID when traveling domestically. The man is my hero, really.

But for a guy with such a technical background, he doesn't get spam. He has long had a pissing contest about running an open relay, believing he has the right to operate his computers as he sees fit. This is a very nice sentiment, one that many of us share in theory, but in the real world he will be taken advantage of. He ended up getting booted by Verio for TOS violations.

Good for Verio.

Today my mailserver rejected mail from John's server, and it's a good bet it was spam (why else would an AOL user be sending mail to me from him?)

Nov 16 19:52:05 linux postfix/smtpd[7073]: 633894252: reject:
        RCPT from new.toad.com[209.237.225.253]: 554 Service unavailable;
        Client host [209.237.225.253] blocked using relays.ordb.org;
        This mail was handled by an open relay - please visit <http://ORDB.org/lookup/?host=209.237.225.253>;
        from=<406kbkow@aol.com> to=<steve@unixwiz.net>
        proto=ESMTP helo=<new.toad.com>

John, you're a hero for freedom, but you don't get to tell me what mail I can receive. And God Bless Verio for booting a customer who is not responsible for his own actions. This is very sad. Posted by Steve at November 16, 2003 08:16 PM | TrackBack