At 12:25 -0500 3/31/03, David F. Skoll wrote:
> From: Jason Hihn <jhihn(_at_)paytimepayroll(_dot_)com>
To: Asrg <asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Subject: [Asrg] How to defeat spam that uses encryption?
If I were a spammer (I am not) I'd start encrypting messages to throw off
content filtering. Public keys are easily obtainable and are readily
associated with good email addresses.
Well, if you were a spammer and you did that, you'd soon be out of
business. I would estimate that fewer than one in 100 e-mail users
use PGP or GnuPG at all, and even fewer than that have a public key.
So you'd drastically limit your audience.
In fact, widespread use of GPG-style encryption could help defeat
spammers. If most people only accepted encrypted messages (except
from whitelisted mailing lists and such), it would become very
expensive to spam. (Yes, I know this will never happen -- don't
bother replying.)
Why is this? If they've got my e-mail address they can get my public key.
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