the proposed mailfrom checking schemes do nothing to prevent a spammer
from creating useless addresses and placing them in mailfrom.
so the scheme merely blocks one particular kind of spammer abuse,
which spammers will be able to nicely route around.
We're not blind to that.
I'm going to jump in here because it's the most common argument I see against
envelope checking - that a spammer or other evil-doer is going to find a new
way to work within the system.
The idea is to make them accountable for doing it. As in, "really, these
guys who operate example.com are abusing e-mail."
Sure there are less-than-pure domain registries who will gladly register a
hundred spammer domains and pocket the profits. Such a scheme would expose
them outright. "No, really, domain registrar X lets e-mail abusers abuse
e-mail." And there are less-than-pure providers who will gladly host them.
Even the domain registries and their Internet providers will be held
accountable, if their customers are not. And from there, <mantra>the users
of e-mail will decide</mantra> what the next step is.
Alan and John refer to accountability all through the LMAP discussion draft.
They even refer to anonymity through acountable means for those who seek it.
Accountability is the beginning of the end of abusing e-mail.[1]
JL> Besides, we're not going to "break" store-and-forward. Really!
author-based mta registrations schemes do break store-and-forward
across the open Internet.
There's a whole other argument against store-and-forward, but being the
ingenious folks that mail programmers are, they too will find a way to make
store-and-forward work within the new system. Meng's SRS is one example of
how.
Absent other substantive changes, such as widespread addition of
dynamic DNS capabilities, they make SMTP work only as a direct channel
between the originator's site and the recipient's site.
Is this a bad thing?
[1] I don't claim to know what the end is. With users deciding, it promises
to be an interesting show, however.
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Sometimes it's hard to tell where the game ends and where reality bites,
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