>It seems to me, both from his allegations and from the
>phraseology of the "Best Practices for Being Permanently Added to the
>RBL", that web hosting services are being treated unfairly in the
>following circumstance:
>
>Company S(pam) has a web site, hosted on the servers of
>web-presence-provider Company P(rovider).
...
That's right. It stops the practice of using a sacrificial account, from
AOL or netcom, to spam for a web-site that is otherwise protected. Does it
make a difference that they didn't spam from their own ISP?
Some people don't know where to draw the line though, is it just the ISP
that hosts the site or all sites linked to that site and so
on until there isn't a net?
This isn't hypothetical as we've been in that position, a spammers
site had a link to ours (and attached a copy of that page to a spam)
so one spamee decided we must be spammers too and filtered us.
As an innocent 3rd party who has no control over who links to our site
(or mentions it in spam) it becomes a simple DOS (lets make a site that
links to the top 100 web sites and make up a spam)
brandon
Some people don't know where to draw the line though, is it just the ISP
that hosts the site or all sites linked to that site and so
on until there isn't a net?
The answer, IMHO... in all of these cases Provider X should shut down
the dialup account.
Case 1. If it's a spam on Provider X advertising a website hosted by
Provider X, Provider X should shut down the website, thus removing the
spammer's reason to spam.
Case 2. If it's a spam on Provider X advertising a site hosted on Provider
Y, Provider Y should shut down the website, thus removing the spammer's
reason to spam.
Case 3. If it's a spam on Provider X advertising a site hosted on Provider Y
that clicks through to a site on Provider Z, Providers Y and Z should
shut down the offending web sites IF AND ONLY IF it is obvious that the Y
page exists to try to shield the site hosted on Z from people who aren't
paying attention.
This is as far as it should ever go, and you have to be extremely careful
with Case 3.
This isn't hypothetical as we've been in that position, a spammers
site had a link to ours (and attached a copy of that page to a spam)
so one spamee decided we must be spammers too and filtered us.
As an innocent 3rd party who has no control over who links to our site
(or mentions it in spam) it becomes a simple DOS (lets make a site that
links to the top 100 web sites and make up a spam)
Yes, if you're just filtering blindly because you see something linked
to a spamvertized site, it does end up becoming a major problem.