My opinion:
This sort of summary (repeated below) lays out very well how much
we're heading straight towards a sort of regulatory heat death.
Who is going to "certify"? On what grounds? How corruptible are they
going to be? Who gets to clarify and modify standards.
The point is that I'm not usually one of these free-market nuts, but
in this case I think anything but assessing some sort of charge is
total madness and doomed to failure. Ten years of going round and
round trying to come up with some way to beat what appears to nearly
be a law of physics has convinced me of that. That is, it's almost as
if we're talking about how inconvenient gravity is, crashes planes,
makes things heavy increasing energy consumption etc, so we should
form an IRTG group and vote for better regulation of gravity.
You'd just be creating a target of opportunity for the highest bidder,
basically, some sort of corruptible, content-oriented regulatory
bureaucracy which has to operate in an international arena.
Personally I think this group would probably have done their job if
they could unanimously or near-unanimously or at least with some
amount of force of conviction just tell the public we've studied the
matter and basically we're trying to do the impossible which is
regulate a free, valuable resource by some unworkable set of rules
either implemented via software or some unnamed vehicle of human fiat
(i.e., regulation, legislation, big men with sticks...)
As such, the only chance of beginning to tackle the spam problem
requires some sort of postage, simple charging, to simply make
resource usage reflect costs. For everyone. Analogous to paper postal
systems with, perhaps, some creative twists to reflect the low cost of
common usage, preferably thrown back to the ISPs et al.
Any other approach, upon some examination, seems to be an exercise in
trying to re-create, this time successfully, what 75 years of the
Soviet Union and other Marxist countries failed to accomplish (I
really don't mean to come off like some kind of right-wing ranter but
for the purpose of discussion and short-hand symbols the metaphor
seemed apt but I wouldn't suggest repeating it in a press release!)
-b
On April 16, 2004 at 22:12 lane(_at_)opendoors(_dot_)com (Lane Sharman) wrote:
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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