Re: namedroppers, continued

I haven't personally tried myself to opt out. But I've read they have the
form. If they told you they don't have a form to sort out junk mail for you
I'd say they were full out it. I'd call the Postmaster General's office.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Sprunk" <ssprunk(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
To: "Bill Cunningham" <billc44(_at_)citynet(_dot_)net>
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: namedroppers, continued

Can you tell me where to get this form?  When I spoke to the USPS, they

said

they're legally obligated to deliver all junk mail addressed to me,
regardless of whether I want it.

Now, the DMA (not the USPS) does have an opt-out list you can join, but
unfortunately that only drops about half the junk mail I get -- many local
mailers don't join the DMA because of cost.

S


Bill Cunningham wrote:

How about passing a law that makes eveyone install a BIOS patch to
block out spam. ;-)

    On the serious side Vernon has a point. Even with snail mail you
can go to the post office and the USPS will provide you with a form
to fill out and they will not put advertisements into your mail. If
ISPs would only do the same. As of yet, if all else fails, deleting a
email box is easier and more effective than taking a ballbat to a
snail mail box.

    --Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vernon Schryver" <vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com>
To: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 12:09 AM
Subject: Re: namedroppers, continued

From: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu

...
The bootstrap problem will exist no matter what scheme we decide on.


There are many spam solutions that do not have the bootstrapping
problem.  Examples include effective laws and honest intent and
action by ISPs.  Before saying those are hopeless, please note that
the many bootstrap-limited proposals don't have proven prospects.

The point I was addressing was that there's been two major classes
of scheme proposed ...

However, the partitions created by each scheme are quite
complementary, ...


Your observation of how those two solutions fit together is
interesting...or would be if they did not suffer from other problems.

...

Moore's law causes a bunch of problems for the computing idea. ...

It may not be as big of a problem as we think.  Rough
back-of-envelope calculations now:  Let's say we assume a function
X designed to take 10 seconds of CPU on my laptop (which has a
1.6Gz P-4 in it) to limit it to 8K messages/day.


http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4/ suggests state of the
commodity art is about twice that, which lets a spammer send 16K
msgs/day. Moore's law is still a treadmill that you don't want to
fight.

              Now, this same function will take around 2 minutes on
a 133mz processor and be restricted to 800 mails/day. ...


I would put the lower limit at around 48 MHz on 80486s, or ~8 times
slower than a 133 MHz Pentium.  Such machines go back less than 10
years. Would you expect your conservative correspondents to spend 15
minutes to send you a message, or would you just white-list them?
Once you start white-listing, it's hard to have much enthusiasm for
more fancier solutions.

Now how many people are still using a 133 system to do that much
outbound mail themselves (and *NOT* just relaying all outbound mail
to a smarthost)?


I think recent FreeBSD and sendmail would still work fine at 48 MHz,
although you probably want to stuff the thing to the gills with 64
MByte of RAM, or more if it can take it.  There are many computing
tasks that don't need 3 GHZ and 3 GByte.

Aren't busy smarthosts significantly busier than 80K msgs/day?

From my old experience, that was true even when they were running

at less than 50 MHz and with perhaps 100 MByte.

Besides, no matter what inmates of glass houses and big ISPs would
have you think, SMTP is a peer-to-peer protocol.  A major damage spam
is doing is helping government commissars and ISP salescritters
convince people that the ancient Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy/whatever
dumb-terminal- connected-to-central-servers is the only way to do
public networking and computing.

And

even *MORE* to the point, what are the chances that a system that
old will be upgraded software-wise to support a scheme, even if it
takes zero additional CPU? ...


Would you whitelist it for the next 10 years?  If there are very
few, white-listing works.  If not, you've got that bootstrapping
problem, and you've invited the white-listing camel into your tent.


Vernon Schryver    vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com


     |          |         Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723
    :|:        :|:        Network Design Consultant
   :|||:      :|||:       Cisco Advanced Services
.:|||||||:..:|||||||:.    Richardson, Texas, USA