In article <slrnfs9dae.s16.spambait@truffula.sj.ca.us>,
spambait@merde.greens.org says...
> In article <MPG.222e57d3ca79fdd498983b@news.octanews.com>, netcat wrote:
> > In article <slrnfs4ehm.lgs.spambait@truffula.sj.ca.us>,
> > spambait@merde.greens.org says...
> >> I've got a few /8s blocked, but most of them have too many
> >> non-abusive holes. My users get legitimate email from Australia,
> >> Japan, and Argentina, unfortunately. It wouldn't bother
> >> us if Russia and Turkey were entirely disconnected from
> >> the Internet.
> >
> > Excuse the idle curiosity... but how can you be sure of this sort of
> > thing?

> I'm not looking for a guarantee. Just a reasonable expectation.

That is of course all well and fine just as long you are sure that your
clients share the same expectations with you.

> Certain countries are widely blocked. They seem to me to have a
> different email culture that isn't compatible with ours.

Our servers are hit by tens of thousands of zombied U.S. dsl clients
every day, shouldn't you conclude you have an e-mail culture
incompatible with the rest of the civilized world as well? ;-)

It _used_ to be most spam came from countries that did totally ignore
foreign abuse notices. And I mean mostly Asia, by that.

However, nowadays the most spam comes from wherever the largest ignorant
masses of home broadband users are.

> People in those nations learn pretty fast to use something like
> Yahoo Mail for a secondary account, if they're using their
> domestic email provider's outbound SMTP at all.

I sincerely doubt that companies, research institutions and such in any
large country would be using Yahoo Mail accounts or overseas hosting.

> If this were a business, I wouldn't get away with such aggressive
> blocking.

Indeed as I suspected.

> But I'd also have a budget for several modern CPU cores'
> worth of Spamassassin bandwidth, and another core for a policy
> server to do some fancy greylisting and reputation tracking.

Yeah. I'm not complaining about spam getting through, merely envying the
expedience of wholesale blocking, it being so much more resource
efficient.

rgds,
netcat