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Re: [ietf-smtp] Dombox - A Zero Spam Mail System

2019-09-26 13:00:00
I have  to agree with Dave and Keith.  This is an arms race, it
is driving the costs of email up, increasing concentration of
actors and raising privacy risks, and driving diversity down.
Spam-carried malware and phishing attacks continue to do real
damage including leading identity theft.

In an odd way, all of that mostly-effective filtering has the
side effect that there isn't enough spam getting through: the
only way to actually stop the arms race is to treat spamming as
a seriously anti-social activity and spammers as criminals and
parts of criminal enterprises.   As long as legislators and
regulators see very little spam themselves, efforts to get
effective laws and enforcement actions are likely to be
ineffective, especially while self-defined "legitimate email
marketers" continue to press for weak laws and regulations to be
sure their activities are not constrained.   From that point of
view, if we really wanted to stop spam, there is one thing we
could do that might be effective and that has not been tried:
we could try to organize an international Spam Impact day (or
week) and persuade everyone to shut down their filters for that
period.  I don't think such persuasion would be likely to
succeed but, if it did, I think it is safe to assume that many
actors in the political arena would decide it was time to Do
Something.

    john




--On Thursday, September 26, 2019 06:39 -0700 Dave Crocker
<dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:

On 9/25/2019 11:57 PM, David MacQuigg wrote:
The big problem I see with new solutions to the spam problem
is - there  is no longer a problem.  Most of the big email
services are doing such a  good job of filtering the spam
that there is really no incentive to  deploy a whole new
system.


This is a false sense of security.

90-95% of the email traffic across the open Internet is spam.
Worse, the bad actors are intelligent, aggressive and
adaptable.  The current situation is a constant arms race.
That defines a fundamentally unstable situation, no matter how
well the defenders are doing at any given moment.

So, yeah, end users typically see only a tiny fraction of
spam, but a) that requires massive amounts of continuing
effort by those running filtering agents, and b) enough still
gets through to cause real-world problems for end users.




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