We know spammers are typically/most often rouge players, do we not?
-e
On Monday, March 31, 2003 11:34 AM, Vernon Schryver
[SMTP:vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com] wrote:
From: wayne <wayne(_at_)midwestcs(_dot_)com>
This little drama is related to the spam problem. There is a component
of human nature that hates purposefully not being heard. Senders of
bulk advertising are often irrationally upset about being filtered.
I agree, and more importantly, *learning* that you are purposely not
being heard.
Exactly.
It should also be noted that there is a part of human nature that
likes to announce deafness, or shout "I can't hear you" with fingers
in ears instead of walking away. Or send "spam LARTS" to spammers.
E.g. should I have used "DISCARD" instead of "REJECT" in my filter?
I think this is why things like DNSBLs used to bounce email and the
challenge-response systems get so much flak about false positives,
where systems that silently /dev/null false positives gets far less
attention. DNSBLs in particular publish their information, so you can
check that you are indeed listed, while you can't test content
filters.
Not so. Body filters can also announce or keep quiet about their
effects with bounces or SMTP status codes like any DNS blacklists.
For example, you can tell sendmail to discard quiently based on
access_DB or DNS blacklist, and a sendmail body filter can generate
a 5yz or 4yz rejection. You can't test a DNSBL that is set to "discard."
You can test a body filter that is not configured to be silent or
misleading by sending a test message to a known bad address and looking
at the result.
Ignorance of a false positive may be bliss, but it isn't a good
thing.
Says who, the spammer or the spam target?
My point is that whether a mail sender cares about a false positive
is completely secondary to whether the mail target wants. If the
mail target does not care about false positives and wants to keep them
secret, then so be it, no matter what the sender might wish.
That is the basis of the spam problem. Senders think they have rights
that supercede the inclinations of targets. Any effective spam defense
must explicitly deprecated all rights of mail senders (except perhaps
copyrights) and must also assume that many mail senders are malicious.
If many mail senders were not malicious, there would be no opposition
to global opt-out lists (including per-domain), even solicited mail
advertising would have "Subject: ADV" tags, and you would not need to
opt-out of newsletters every 6 months,
Thus, back to my claim that communicating consent to mail senders is
a bad idea. Some mail senders would honor expressions of consent,
but most will not.
Proof of that "most" is that solicited mail advertising does not carry
"Subject: ADV" tags. If most advertisers really wanted to honor
recipient consent, they would go out of their way to label their
missives to give their targets many ways to implement their consent.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg