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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Spam Control Considered Harmful
Phil, The analog to email in the real world is the US Postal service where we have even far weaker authentication systems in place. To cope with abuses, we passed laws governing the use the the mails when Ben Franklin got a anonymous and most unwelcomed solicitation from Thomas Jefferson. I personally see no practical technical means of eliminating the practise of spamming and rather than spending time trying to dream up fancier and smarter sendmail's, we should seek to simply expand the current mail fraud laws to cover electronic mail. Then we can simply sic the FBI on these people armed with terabytes of logs and spam emails and then see what happens when a few are convicted of electonic mail fraud and sent up the river for a rest. Cal "Yes, my house is made of brick, but the front door is made of glass. I do this because I have faith in the social contract I have with my neighbors that assures me that they won't break it and I won't call the cops (or, when I lived in Texas, use my gun)." Begin forwarded message: X-Sender: [email protected] X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.3 (32) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 18:06:33 -0500 To: [email protected] From: Phil Lawlor <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Spam Control Considered Harmful Cc: [email protected] At 12:56 PM 10/29/97 -0600, Cal Thixton - President - ThoughtPort Authority of Chicago wrote: >The problem with the 'Caller-ID' idea is verifying that an email address is >'valid' (assuming you have a reasonable definition for 'valid'). About the only >thing that sendmail can do is verify a reverse lookup is equal to its forward >lookup. Exactly. I guess the question is, should we build more sender verification into sendmail, on both the sending and receiving side? Phil Lawlor President AGIS Voice - 313-730-1130 Fax - 313-563-6119
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