From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com>
...
I found the following to be an interesting read:
http://www.cdt.org/spam/
It shows that even five years ago or so most ligitimate businesses
advertising legitimate services through spam employed header forgery.
...
It is an article of faith for many people that most spam involves
header forgery, but no one seems to have better support than intuition
for that faith. Where in the report at http://www.cdt.org/spam/ does
it say that "most ligitimate businesses advertising legitimate services
through spam employed header forgery?" I found "forged addresses and
domain names as the source of innumerable problems" and similar
statements, but they differ signficiantly from the familiar claims
that most spam involves header forgery. Moreover, since that report
there have been the Flowers.com case and many state laws against header
forgery that I think have discouraged a lot of header forgery.
A lot of spam does involve header forgery, but a lot clearly does not.
The problem with concluding that "most" spam uses header forgery is
that it encourages looking for solutions to header forgery instead of
stopping unsolicited bulk mail.
That leads to a major problem in dealing with spam. Most people
who say they want to stop spam in fact have other goals that they
value more. Those other goals include:
- stopping header forgery,
- making all mail "authenticated," for various notions of that word,
- stopping commercial email, and never mind that an order confirmation
is commercial,
- stopping unsolicited commercial email (Never mind that many of us
depend on unsolicited non-bulk commercial email for our daily bread),
- selling anti-spam services or software,
- counting coup on spammers by "LARTing" them, signing them up for
junk postal mail, etc,
- becoming famous for having stopped spam, or at least getting into
the RFC index.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com