Re: Spam Control Considered Harmful

[Cal Thixton - President - ThoughtPort Authority of Chicago <cthixton () thoughtport net>]

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: phil () agis net
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Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 18:06:33 -0500
To: Cal_Thixton () TPA Net
From: Phil Lawlor <phil () agis net>
Subject: Re: Spam Control Considered Harmful
Cc: nanog () merit edu


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