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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