On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 09:33:29 PST, Hadmut Danisch <hadmut(_at_)danisch(_dot_)de>
said:
I see strong interests to spoil any success of this group
to find a technical solution. This group is under a
certain kind of attack: The commercial attack.
Hmm.. I can't speak for the commercial people, I'm about as non-commercial
as it gets, being both civil service *AND* academia. A big chunk of
the "spoil the success" is really just those of us who have tried the same
things before pointing out the problems that were encountered the last time.
(For instance, I don't think I've come out and said "this can't possibly work"
too often - though I'll admit I've tossed my share of "but first you have to
fix this...")
Why are so many people strictly against anything what could prevent
spam at the sender side? Because the sender wouldn't pay for a
solution. Why do so many people insist on the freedom of the sender
to send whatever the sender wishes to send with a sender address the
sender can randomly choose? Simple answer: That's the only way to make
the recipient buy anti-spam-software or anti-spam-services.
Actually, the problem is that there are *3* places we can stop the
problem: the several hundred spammers, 100K ISPs, or 400M end users.
Anybody who's tried to deploy software to end users (especially software
that involves retraining) knows 400M is the wrong place to attack. And
even a well-hidden Proof-Of-Work doesn't help here - your phone WILL ring
when people ask why it's taking 3 minutes to send mail.
I've never said I'm *STRICTLY* against a sender-side solution. My generic
criteria for a sender-side solution is: It has to be something that my
mother the Hotmail user can deploy without me or my brother having to
make a trip home to install for her. Windows 98 on a several-year-old PC.
And this is a very real constraint, and imposes significant barriers to
entire classes of solutions.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if most of the spammers turned out
to be the same people selling anti-spam-software and services, and
trying to put through recipient-only solutions.
The interesting thing is that this list seems to contain neither spammers
nor people who make a living selling anti-spam solutions. It is however
full of people who have an interest in protecting their systems from spam.
And maybe that's why the mailing list is flooded with so much
rubbish and babble. That's some kind of denial of service attack.
Actually, I was attributing that to the well-known fact that the effective
IQ of a committee is given by "minimum IQ on the committee, divided by the
number of heads". ;)
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