At 7:17 AM -0400 8/16/02, Bill Cunningham wrote:
When you go into a business you may see a "No Soliciting" sign. This sign is
backed up by law. I've never seen a "Soliciters are welcome here" sign.
If MIME protocols had built in extensions that were the equivalant of a "No
Soliciting" sign, and were backed up by law, could that work?
The spammers have no interest in putting an "I am a solicitor" sign
anywhere in their message, and solicitors in your building do not
wear anything special in order to see the sign. They have to use
their own brain, and received messages depend on the recipient's
brains to view the message. In fact, spammers do their best to look
like a friend or someone you know and will accept into your space.
MIME is only seen by the recipient's software after the message has
been accepted for delivery, unless you search the whole body of the
message for some hidden clues.
The protocol is more like "hide and seek" combined with "catch me if
you can" than anything else.
Mail is "whole-message-store-and-forward" so there is no dialog
between sender and recipient before delivery is completed.
So, the equivalent of such a sign only exists in my filters, which do
not look for "I am a solicitor" signs in the incoming message. They
look for more useful things like "cn.net" or "com.ru" or "com.cn"
which are useful surrogates for "I am a Solicitor" signs.
Cheers..\Stef