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Re[2]: Why spam is a problem.

2002-08-13 21:03:18
On Tue, 13 Aug 2002 23:11:02 -0400 Bill Sommerfeld 
<sommerfeld(_at_)orchard(_dot_)arlington(_dot_)ma(_dot_)us> wrote:
One possibly hairbrained half-technical idea which I haven't seen
suggested elsewhere..
 
Defines a SMTP connect banner token which is the moral equivalent of a
"no soliciting" sign.  It indicates "unsolicited commercial email not
welcome at this server".

actually, it has been proposed before, although a IETF draft on the subject
never went anywhere so far as i know. at least some proposed legislation
has indicated that a standards body such as the IETF would be defered to if
such a standard came into being.

such banners are trivial to deploy, and some folks in the spam fighting
community deploy them despite the lack of a standard, on general
principles. for example:

220 krusty1.krusty-motorsports.com ESMTP
        Exim 4.05 Wed, 14 Aug 2002 03:57:46 +0000
        [ NO UCE NO UBE C=US,ST=New York ]

in the absence of a rigidly formatted banner deployed at the SMTP level,
what we're seeing in some legislation are truly harebrained ideas where
there needs to be a web page, with no defined format for specifying policy.
an actual IETF standard for a "NO UBE" smtp banner might be a good thing.
i personally would prefer NO UBE to NO UCE, as not all UCE is bad. it's
the bulk part that creates the scaling problem.

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         
rwelty(_at_)averillpark(_dot_)net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security




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