Barry Shein wrote:
On July 2, 2003 at 11:56 research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com (Yakov
Shafranovich) wrote:
> However, should we be considering a solution that replaces the email
> infrastructure as a long term answer to spam?
Personally I think we should, with the following reasoning:
1. The (modern) spam problem has been around for at least 7 years,
I have discussion notes with many of the same topics going back
to at least 1996.
Since we're still not making much progress I think it'd be a bad
idea to cut off ideas, de facto, just because they have a longer
horizon.
Actually if memory serves me the first spam was sent by some guy at DEC
when the Internet was still tightly controlled. I always thought the AUP
was silly.
2. This is not to say that proposals with a longer horizon should in
any way preclude ideas with a shorter adoption period. But as I see
it, given the seven-plus year history, it may be unwise to rely
only on the possibility that someone is going to come up with a
quick fix.
3. It's not clear how to measure these claims that certain changes
would require years and years to adopt.
Although it might be reasonable to claim that it'd be years before
a major new mail protocol were adopted universally, how much of the
net would have to adopt it before it'd make a significant
difference in spam reduction?
For example, if the top 10 ISPs were to adopt some sort of
significant infrastructure change which reduced spam passing
through or to them wouldn't that likely reduce all spam
significantly, even if it only represented a .0001% adoption?
(this of course presumes some sort of continued inter-operability
with non-adopters.)
I find this very hard to believe. I get so little spam from AOL, MSN or
Yahoo now a days I doubt it would have any impact on the few hundred I
get every day!
4. Just the same, having looked at some of the suggested alternatives
to SMTP, I'm not sure they're quite what they're claimed to be.
By and large SMTP is just another little text-based:
VERB [NOUN]* <CRLF>
protocol (HELO host.name, MAIL FROM:<x(_at_)yz(_dot_)com>, etc.)
The proposals I've seen just add some new verbs, possibly with the
intention of replacing some existing verbs, but otherwise are
pretty much the same thing.
SMTP has had verbs added before (EHLO, ETRN, etc.)
One could even imply a major change in implementation (e.g.,
extensibility) and not really change the protocol much beyond
adding some new verbs.
On this point I agree.
Chuck Wegrzyn
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