On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 12:00:47AM -0800, william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net wrote:
I'd like to ask what people feel about making it a part of anti-spam
system such that if say somebody is sending same content message to more
then 5-10 recepients on your server, then it has to be considered
maillist email and has to contain proper maillist headers and opt-out
information.
Of course, spammers can add all these headers as well but we can make some
kind of black/whitelist of good well known mailing lists or even do some
kind of stamp-like system to verify the email is sent from good maillist.
This is a reasonable step, but spammers are already quite adept at altering
the content of their emails to individualize them sufficiently to avoid
such tests, as we know. There is at best an arms race at that.
I do agree that bulk mail should be tagged as bulk mail, and the email specs
already specify the Precedence header though I would have named it differently.
It is risky however to reject untagged mail with just 5-10 recipients since
there are literally millions of "personal" mailing lists with dozens to
hundreds of recipients, that are often sent by ordinary users not using a
mailing list system. Such mail may not be tagged in such cases. We
could start enforcing that tagging restriction more carefully, which would
behoove MUAs and MTAs to notice when a user is doing a mailing to his address
book to announce his new baby, and putting on the Precedence: bulk tag.
Long ago I even proposed the tag should be extended, so that it would get
attributes such as the relationship of recipient to sender
(stranger/known/subscriber/customer) and the number of entries in the mailing.
But spammers of course would not tag. If the government were to make
a law asking the IETF to come up with a tagging system, that's the sort
of one I would propose:
Precedence: junk; relation=stranger; count=50000
Would be how you tag a spam
Precedence: bulk; relation=known; count=150
Would be how you tag a baby announcement
Precedence: bulk; relation=customer; count=10000
Would be how you tag a mailing to customers.
And do on.
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