[LINK] Solution to SPAM checking

[kim holburn]

ASIGFINFE (Yet Another Spam Idea Good For Individuals, Not For
Everyone) - Spammers will change their techniques to be more RFC
compliant as soon as (if) Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Gmail adopted this
method.

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from country to country.)

(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate
potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(x) deadlock or race conditions caused by everyone adopting the system
(x) making servers more vulnerable to spammers
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
 ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

On 2007/Jan/31, at 11:53 AM, Adam Todd wrote:
> I don't know why I haven't thought of this before, years before.
> Maybe it was spurred by the recent two days of trials where the
> prosecutor was trying to say that on one hand there was something
> and someone was getting something, and on the other and the someone
> wasn't getting anything.
>
> Anyway, it occurred to me that when an email is sent, .the SMTP
> server connects with the remote server and says "Hello I am me, and
> I have a message for you from XYZ"
>
> What doesn't happen though is the receiving server doesn't say
> "Just a sec, I want to see if you are really who you say you are
> and you really do represent what you claim to represent."
>
> If the RX SMTP server were to check the path of incoming mail or
> even connect to the "reply address" to ensure that it was
> legitimate and valid and was in fact related to the DNS records for
> the originating domain, then SPAM would vanish over night.
>
> You couldn't use a fraud sender address, as the check would show
> that the SMTP server talking and the SMTP server authoritive for
> the proper sender was different.  Even in a relay situation, MX
> records should generally resolve that.
>
> Anyway, just a thought.  It's a "way too big" to solve problem and
 > no one really cares enough to stop SPAM being sent, people just
> want to filter it when it's delivered.


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3342707610
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request

Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                          -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961