more on 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>
Date: June 23, 2004 11:13:21 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 05:36:29AM -0400, David Farber wrote:
> Four large Internet service providers agreed yesterday to a
> partial truce in their battle with one another over
> potential technology to stop junk e-mail in hopes that they
> can devote their united energy to fighting spam.

1. Several of those providers are primary sources of spam (and spam
support, including web site hosting, mailing list services, mailboxes,
etc.).  Perhaps they should clean up their own networks before 
attempting
to mount the soapbox and tell the rest of the world what to do.

2. SPF/domainkeys/et.al. are moot.  Spammers have already developed a
number of methods to work around them, and the only reason we haven't 
seen
these on a large scale (to date) is that there simply hasn't been any 
need
for spammers to deploy them.  Note as well that SPF/domainkeys et.al. 
only
deal with SMTP spam -- thus severely limiting their applicability.

3. The proposals about rate-limiting demonstrate just how amazingly
out-of-touch these people are with current spammer strategies and 
tactics.
Implementation of these would do NOTHING to stop spam, while having a
devastating effect on legitimate mailing lists -- which are some of the
Internet's most valuable resources.

---Rsk

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