North American Network Operators Group

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Re: E-Mail authentication fight looming: Microsoft pushing Sender ID

  • From: Rich Kulawiec
  • Date: Wed Jul 06 15:27:05 2005

[late followup, sorry]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 05:42:17AM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
> The real fight is to find ANY techniques that have long-term, global 
> benefit in reducing spam.

We've already got them -- we've always had them.  What we lack is
the guts to *use* them.

As we've seen over and over again, the one and only technique that has
ever worked (and that I think ever *will* work) is the boycott --
whether enforced via the use of DNSBLs or RHSBLs or local blacklists or
firewalls or whatever mechanism.  It works for a simple reason: it makes
the spam problem the problem of the originator(s), not the recipient(s).
It forces them to either fix their broken operation (any network which
persisently emits or supports spam/abuse is broken) or find themselves
running an intranet.

We've known that this works for 20-odd years.  It hasn't stopped working;
what's stopped is the willingness to use it en masse, and to endure the
consequences of thereof.  And no new technology, however clever, is a
substitute for the will to make this happen when necessary.

I grow rather tired of people whining about the spam (and abuse) problem
on the one hand...while refusing to take simple, well-known, and proven
steps to push the consequences back on those responsible for it.  While we
may no longer be in a position to remove particularly egregious networks
from the Internet, we most certainly are in a position to remove the
Internet from them via coordinated group action -- producing an
equivalent result.

It's gonna come down to this sooner or later anyway.  We might as well
do it now, rather than waste another decade fiddling around with
clever-but-useless technical proposals and worthless legislation
while the problem continues to proliferate and diversify.

---Rsk