[e2e] Fwd: Camel's nose in the tent

[David P. Reed]

At 01:17 PM 8/10/01 -0400, stanislav shalunov wrote:
>While it's entirely their option to block mail based on arbitrary
>criteria, including "From:" headers or anything else (as it is the
>option of their users to avoid ISPs that annoy their own users), and I
>don't see any great violation of engineering principles of SMTP here
>(there *would* be a serious violation of these principles if they
>replaced your "From:" line with what they think is the correct line),
>it's definitely a poor practice.

As a matter of law, it is not their option to block mail based on arbitrary 
criteria.  In particular, the First Amendment does apply here, as do a 
variety of telecommunications laws.

As a matter of contract, ISPs claim to offer "Internet service" not 
"whatever I feel like".  Claiming to offer Internet service while not 
following the standards as written or as commonly understood by those who 
maintain the could be judged as bad behavior - statutes and common law 
about fraud, consumer fraud, etc. may well apply (I'm not a lawyer, but 
I've been a business executive long enough to know something about such 
limits on what one can do).

As a matter of engineering practice, you are wrong.  SMTP provides an 
end-to-end guarantee that the contents will be preserved intact (modulo 
adding Received: lines at the front).

Of course, if your standard of good engineering practice is something like 
"any kludge that I happen to think won't screw too many people up," your 
mileage may vary.  Standards and module boundaries are part of good 
engineering practice, and have excellent justifications because they 
enhance flexibility and evolvability of systems on the large scale.

Finally, Verizon and others are barred from a variety of behaviors because 
they hold a monopoly position in their market (in this case, residential 
high-speed Internet access) - thus they cannot discriminate or limit 
services just to maintain their monopoly.  Blocking port 25, for example, 
may well be viewed as an attempt to maintain their monopoly.

>

- David
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