Re: Spam Control Considered Harmful

[Bill Becker <bbecker () iconn net>]

On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, Scott Hazen Mueller wrote:

> address verification may or may not be enough.  There is no statute or case
> law that makes the owner of an address legally liable for the mail emitting
> from there - this could be an issue for claims of forgery and the like.

Scott -- I believe that the legal ins and outs are mostly moot.  The scope
of spam is global while most law is national or local.  To use
less-than-global law to regulate something of a global nature, you would
need customs services that would prevent spam from being smuggled in from
other jurisdictions where spam is legal.  

I believe that the only thing you can do with courts is to use the civil
courts to discourage spammers.  You sue the bastards, but only after you 
get abused.  

> *possibly* be the infrastructure for building the second.  However, limiting
> anonymity likely wouldn't provide a strong deterrent by itself, since spammers
> could still run through multiple non-anonymous dialup accounts over the
> lifetime of a spam campaign.

The basic concepts about email have to change.  The present system is
hopelessly out of date. 

> The scheme has generally not been sketched in much further detail because the
> deployment issues typically overwhelm any discussion.

One way this could happen is with large content providers.  They must see
spammers the same way that we do -- As parasites.  If AOL and CIS et al
wanted a UCE-free protocol, i'm sure that Qualcom and Netscape et al would
support it.  Somebody let me know when beta testing starts. 

Bill