Re: namedroppers, continued

Vernon Schryver wrote:
> It's been years since it was possible to be amused by the number of
> people who assume that spammers are more ignorant and less competent
> than they are, and so propose spam "solutions" predicated on spammers
> being unable to register as many names, keys, identities, or whatever
> as needed or as many as everybody else can.
The problem I've seen repeatedly, including in an off-list discussion I'm
having about this topic, is people confusing authentication with
authorization.

Even if you can authenticate every sender of every piece of email, that
gains us virtually nothing -- not to mention it's a reasonably well-solved
problem, e.g. PGP, S/MIME.  As Vernon notes, spammers can create authentic
credentials just as easily as anyone else.

The devil is in determining what senders are authorized once we've
authenticated them.  My fear is the only effective solution may turn out to
be closed lists with permission grants, such as the IM services introduced
to keep spammers out.  That will greatly reduce the utility of email.

S