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Re: [Asrg] Usefulness of wholesale blocking of attachments for SMTP?

2004-04-16 22:25:53
Hi Yakov,

It seems to me that there would be some of the following in a bulk email solution. Because, for sure, there are a lot of legit bulk emailers.

a) an accreditation process which would include certification of a legit sender. The sender has to present himself/herself before a physical post office for example. b) a bulk stamp purchase agreement is executed and paid for by the originator. c) a set of designated relay servers would be designated to "affix the stamp" on behalf of the originator, the bulk sender. d) any relay could verify that a stamp instance as valid with a remote lookup; forgeries would be thwarted because the stamp expires and other characteristics.

-Lane





Yakov Shafranovich wrote:

Lane Sharman wrote:

What interests me is point of origin detection, identification and blocking. In other words, what addition to the SMTP protocol would make it possible to identify, for example, "unstamped email being sent out in bulk mode". Statistically, isn't it possible to identify an instance of a bulk email event on the net?


DCC (http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/) tries to detect bulk emails as do some other projects. This is not something that requires addition to SMTP and is an separate protocol.

Of course we must remember that bulk email is not necessarily bad. There are many instances of legit bulk email (e.g. acceptance letters from a college, bank statement notifications, etc.). So knowing that a specific email is bulk is only half the problem, once you know it is bulk there needs to be a determination as to whether it is legit or not.

This is what Project Lumus, TEOS and some other mechanisms try to do - whitelist or accredit legit bulk emailers. Of course, a single unified framework of standard for the entire Internet on exchanging accreditation and reputation data is something that might solve this as well, so far there hasn't been sufficient interest in that area (the SMTP-VERIFY subgroup was looking into it as some point).

Yakov


--
Lane Sharman
Providing Private and SPAM-Free Email
http://www.opendoors.com
858-755-2868




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