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[Asrg] Re: Why SPAM is worse in SMTP than in other protocols

2003-12-23 08:55:28
That said, we already know the key flaws in the current MTS. Weak
"trust" model, lack of "authentication", lack of means for
distributing and enforcing recipient policy. ...

The real reason there's e-mail spam is that e-mail by its nature the
costs are mostly borne by the recipient.  Everything else flows from
that.  There's no way to fix that without a top to bottom redesign and
maybe not even then.  (By fix I mean move the actual location of the
costs, not layering on an e-postage scheme that's supposed to
artificially compensate recipients and charge senders.)

There aren't any large-scale communication system in which all of the
participants are authenticated and I don't see that any of us know how
to build one.  Paper mail isn't authenticated at all, scribble any
return address you want on an envelope, and they'll deliver it.  The
phone system is probably as close as we'll get, but even there the
authentication is just sufficient to know who to bill for a call, not
to identify the caller, and we all know that tracing the source of a
phone call is not always easy.

All of the scams we see in spam started in other places.  "Make money
fast" started in paper mail -- I once got an actual paper Dave Rhodes
letter.  The 419 scam was done by mail and fax before it moved to
e-mail and in its original guise as the Spanish Prisoner, by quill
pens and sealing wax.  They moved to e-mail because it's cheap, not
because it's unauthenticated.

Even if you could build a gigantic authentication system for e-mail,
it'd only work to the extent that people played by the rules.  Look at
the banking and credit card system, which process a vast number of
daily transactions (but still a couple of orders of magnitude short of
e-mail) in which all of the participants are supposed to be known.
There's constant problems with bogus and bounced checks, invalid and
stolen credit cards, and other fake transactions.  Despite the
enormous scale, transactions still cost about a dime apiece, way too
expensive for e-mail.  Any authentication scheme we build will be
attacked in every way that the bad guys can invent, requiring whole
new layers of rules and sanctions, and I don't see any reason to think
that the problems from such a system would be less bad than the
problems we have now.

I'm not saying that solving the spam problem is hopeless, but I am
saying that lack of authentication isn't the problem, too much mail to
people who don't want it is the problem.  Authentication can help
track a lot of the mail so that non-technical sanctions can be applied
to the senders, but it's only one tool in the toolbox.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com


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