On Sat, 29 Mar 2003 17:36:29 -0800 (PST)
william <william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net> wrote:
From NOIE (Australian Goverment) Study on Spam: " Spam- Towards a
Working Definition
(utterly non-argumentatively) My working definition is purely
subjective:
SPAM is email from people we don't know, and/or don't want to know,
offering us things we don't want (to know about).
Its a nice subjective definition, which in turn reveals why attempts at
useful objective definitions which can be enforced mb mechanism and
machinery have failed.
In turn that defines what we're (presumably) trying to do with this
group: prevent abuse of mail systems by those people we don't know
and/or don't want to know, offering us things we don't want (to know
about). "Abuse" would seem the key word. I don't see much reason to
worry about spammers who don't forge mail headers and who have valid
MXes -- we have plenty pf large and accurate clubs to beat sense into
their heads once we know who they are. The one's we're actually
interested in are the ones who abuse the system: who exploit open
relays, who forge mail (deliberately or via KLEZ-style virii), or who
otherwise deliberately attempt to circumvent our controls and get that
mail from people we don't know...etc...in front of our eyeballs.
Okay, so we're trying to catch the crooks. The good guys either fully
play by the rules, or make themselves clearly visible and thus
targetable by playing by the rules (valid headers, MXes, etc). Its the
guys who are attempting to lie, cheat, and finagle, to break the systen,
that we're interested in. Or, more simply: we're interested in that
population of mail users we can safely trust to be untrustworthy.
That tends to suggest a standard police/law vs criminal arms race, and
the history of SPAM techniques to date pretty clearly shows that in
Victorian splendor.
Also I'm currently reviewing all ASRG messages in archive for this
first month preparing to make summary of work...
Excellent. Your notes to date have been most useful and thought
provoking.
--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg