It seems to me that the members of the group are looking at the spam
problem from two different angles:
1. Network Abuse - some people including Barry Shain and Eric Brunner
specifically, have been proposing that we look at the entire spam problem
as one of network abuse. The Internet in general, and SMTP in particular,
have been built as open systems trusting all network users to behave
themselves. Spam is caused by those users abusing the network and its
resources.
2. Consent - others in particular, the people or person who wrote the group
charter, propose that spam be viewed as an issue of consent. Spam is caused
by the fact that the receivers have no mechanisms in place to be able to
express their consent to receiving email.
Thus, all of the proposals fall into three general categories:
1. Network Abuse - these proposals are the ones that look at the underlying
nature of email and trying to fix or correct the abuse problem. This
includes RMX, rDNS, certificates in DNS, distributed spam detection systems
such as DCC, systems for detecting open relays and proxies, creating a
separate email system, moving from SMTP to a different protocol, charging
for sending email, etc.
2. Consent - these proposals do not try to block the email at the sender's
end, or as at being transferred over the network. Instead, they concentrate
solely at the receiver's point. These proposals define various mechanisms
and structures through which the receiver (or his ISP), can his or her
consent about wanting to receive email. These include trusted sender
systems (like Habeas), filtering systems based on message content (like
SpamAssasin, HTML blocking), C/R systems, systems based on passwords
(Selby's proposal for lock-and-key), manual whitelists, etc.
3. Combination - these includes combination systems like filtering on
receiver's end based on a blacklist of open proxies, etc.
The problem is that many of these approaches if implemented independently
of each other, would not be able to operate together as a cohesive system,
and in some cases interfere with each other. I would like to see these two
models of spam and three approaches to anti-spam defined clearly so we can
work out a cohesive model of how to fight spam.
Yakov
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