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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: Paul's Mailfrom (Was: IETF SMTP Working Group Proposal atsmtpng.org)
Point of Information:
Every single purely technical approach to stopping spam has been a
complete loser.
I understand the old adage that when all you have is a hammer the
whole world looks like a nail.
And that all many people on this list have is a technical hammer, some
ability to hack around with cisco access lists or similar, so they
tend to hold out hope that some new access list formula might be the
one that saves the day (or similar, don't quibble the example!)
But spam is as much a socio-legal problem as a technical one which is
why, I'd claim, it's been so completely resistant to all purely
technical approaches thus far.
What we need are technical solutions which help with concomitant
socio-legal solutions.
If you haven't noticed, the spammers are winning completely, the
waters are rising rapidly.
More and more legitimate-sounding companies and products are spamming,
and by and large the public perception in the non-anointed* business
community are coming to the conclusion that they receive all this spam
so it must be a legitimate form of advertising.
Let me throw out the following to show how blind the technical
community has been:
There is no RFC or other public standards document which even attempts
to define spam or explain, in a careful and professional manner,
why it is a bad thing.
(before you say the obvious, that's not what RFCs are for, read, e.g.,
RFC 2964)
However, we expect lawmakers to recognize and define the problem and
get it right when the engineers who understand the technology and
problem, in nearly a decade of whining, can't even be bothered to
provide them with robust definitions of what it is the whining is
about.
Food for thought, that's all.
But, personally, I'm hesitant to spend my time trying to study the
merits of yet another anti-spam miracle cure, even if it seems at
first glance (like so many before) that it might foil some particular
flavor of spam which has been prevalent in the past.
Now, after sitting through this extended, multi-day discussion of spam
someone can send me the standard "discussion of spam is not a subject
for nanog!" because I'm not a member of the amen crowd.
* "non-anointed": not a member of the technical community hence
indoctrinated into a particular ethical view of what's right and wrong
on the net.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | [email protected] | http://www.TheWorld.com
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