Re: SFF problem with VSI on Integrity?

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 19:58:16 -0400, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

Defaulting to an open relay is just spectacularly stupid.

Back in the 1990s, as the spam problem was just gathering steam, there
were some old-school sysadmins who vehemently insisted on their right to
continue maintaining open mail relays.

I was one of them, making the argument that abusers should be dealt with
rather than just hiding the problem.  Unfortunately the makeup of the
internet was changing at the time and things were growing to the point
where admins were no longer able to keep track of their users and I think
a lot of us didn't see the impending train wreck and destruction of the
community we knew and loved coming.

+1

My second major project as a systems programmer (the first being a JCL
translator from SVS on an Amdahl 470/v7 to MVS on an IBM 3081) was an e-mail
system upgrade to allow the University of Chicago to use network mail.  This
was a project sponsored by Educom, a network called Edunet, and explicitly
utilized the open relay syntax specified in RFC 822.  (This was 1983-84.)

10 years later, as the mail administrator at our startup, I had to swallow the
bitter draft that was turning off the open relay in the later release of the
very same e-mail system I had a hand in at Chicago.

--
Rich Alderson   news@alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
  omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen