Re: [Mldonkey-users] OT: P2P via SMTP and Open Relays

[René Gallati]

Hello,

>  I can agree with many points of your statement. But not with all:
>
>  Using unsafe Open-Relays seems like a "they asked to be used". The only 
> thing those lazy admins could do is securing their open relay and therefore 
> stopping P2P and Spam both at once.

Yeah open mail relays are a problem, but they usually send "only" spam, 
not huge binary attachments. Also, it really depends where the relay is 
located. If someone spams in western europe, you can usually just report 
them to their ISP and they get nuked. Though luck trying the same with 
Asian-relays though. You can be happy if you get an answer and doubly so 
if that person speaks/writes halfway english.

However for the sake of the argument, most spam coming from asian 
countries can easily be filtered out by looking at the charset header 
field. Unfortunately more and more us/european spammers are actively 
looking for asian open relays since they are hard to get closed and they 
then (ab)use them.

>  News are a permanent and global resource, massive BCC-EMail isn't. That 
> makes BCC-EMail harder to track and the participants harder to bother. Its 

BCC is only invisible at the user-agent level. The mailserver knows 
exactly where the mail comes from and for whom it is. (otherwise it 
couldn't deliver it anyway...) Tracking the originator of a BCC'ed mail 
is easy - but only for the admin of the mailserver or someone who got 
access to that mailserver's logs.

> also more economic than classic/napstertype P2P for low- and 
> medium-counting releases. Besides, paying for a service like a binary-nntp 
> is getting way too commercial in my humble oppinion.

Agreed. However, at the end you always pay *someone* - be that your ISP 
or your university for your Internet access.

The sheer amount of data on a full usenet feed (currently around 
700GBytes/day) require quite some infrastructure which does cost. As 
comparison, non-binary usenet (text-only) is about 2GBytes/day currently.

>  But besides of that your points about nntp-services are totally correct, 
> they are even more efficient than BCC-EMail. Too bad there are no german 
> providers left offering *.binaries.*

But there are! http://www.premium-news.com/index.html is one. Dunno 
about others. But why has it to be a german NSP? The Internet is global, 
you know and as long as your latency is not above 500ms, you'll usually 
get great speed to the NSPs.

> > And yes, I administer several systems and some are mailservers. The
> > first one I see using such a scheme looses his internet access on the
> > very same day, no matter if he is on the sending or recieving side. That
> > I promise.
>
>  The first one who is missusing a relay run by a dangerous admin isn't 
> worth that the admin spits out his head after chewing on him. In other 
> words, compared with the content most people are distributing the way of 
> distributing it seems like a minor legal problem.

Its not that I hate the user personally, its just that such a thing 
causes severe service degradation for everyone else - which is simply 
untolerable. There is a huge difference if I get a few 100KB of spam 
mails or if I get a few hundred Megabytes binary attachments. Bandwith 
is not even the main problem, the I/O load on the machines is. A normal 
mail (be that spam or not) fits perfectly into ram, gets processed and 
saved or sent on. A big mail with attachment has a much higher chance to 
get swapped/spooled. If many big mails need to be processed your system 
falls in constant swapping state, which stalls any access to it.