Craig Cockburn said:
The thin end of the wedge?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4684942.stm
Craig,
I'm at a loss to see how this changes anything in terms of what we might
do to mitigate spam. Now we have AOL and Yahoo seeing revenue in
"legalized SPAM", in which a company pays postage to bypass the
anti-spam filters installed by these providers. I can just hear their
customers now complaining about these postage-paid bulk e-mails, only to
be told that receiving them is part and parcel of their TOS. These guys
appear to know how to consume every part of their customers.
The other interesting article at the site was on how America was
apparently winning the war on spam. SPAM rates are down according to
the BBC, and they stated that many Americans are growing accustomed to
spam as a minor nuisance, not enough to make them give up e-mail. As a
thermometer for Americans, I know the BBC to be flawed. My informal
poll of my two over-18 children indicates that they have abandoned
e-mail because the channel is so noisy -- they do text messaging via
their cellphones to the party they need to address, or use an instant
messaging service. I also know that, in a poll of a single elder
American, even a single spam in my mailbox annoys me tremendously, with
enough annoyance to imagine all sorts of mayhem perpetrated upon its sender.
As another measure, a significant number of the 3rd party bounce
messages my postmaster account is now receiving is for mailbox full
conditions. So, for the affected individuals, spam is more than a minor
nuisance -- it is preventing them from receiving messages they really
need to see. By the way, these "mailbox full" bounces often list many
addresses for their providers, thus indicating that the mailboxes
provided by these providers are unprotected by any anti-spam regime. I
pity their users.
All,
With regard to e-mail oddities and SPF thoughts, as a "newbie" I can't
contribute much more than to watch the information my betters are
providing me as it comes past. However, with regard to the current
.forward protocol as described by "der Mouse" and others, the outward
appearance when ".forwarded" mail arrives at a foreign mailserver is
identical to the outward appearance of spam -- mail from a perported
user appearing from a mailserver not designated to send mail from that
user's domain. Hence, either ".forwarding" needs to go away, or a
simple method instituted to differentiate it from spam. And "simple" in
my mind means not more complicated than a DNS lookup. I'm now looking
at all the abbreviations tossed forth in the argument to see what they
mean and whether they a synonym for my Holy "simple" Grail.
Cheers,
Doug Campbell
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