Chapter 11 · 15 Table of Contents

Tactic 15. Spam Peering Requests

Everyone hates spam, but one apparently effective approach to establishing peering is to send e-mail to all participants at various exchange points.

(If you use this tactic, please make sure that “Reply to Self” and not “Reply to List” is selected.)

This approach led to dozens of peering sessions being set up very quickly. Since many companies on the Public Peering fabric are “open” peers, this approach effectively yields peering with a potentially large number of ISPs and content companies (Figure 11-30).

**Figure 11-30.** Spam peering requests to exchange point discussion lists.

The problems with this approach include that:

The result might be a large number of high-maintenance low-volume peers.
The activity signals that you are a less-desirable peer since you resorted to blanket peering requests instead of selecting the ones that mattered most and interacting with them one-by-one.

The ISP that reported this tactic said he was surprised at which ISPs responded to this approach, and said that he might not have even tried to seek peering with some of them.