Paul Hoffman wrote:
Tony's proposal is not for new software: it is for software that
*replaces* what they have now. Further, it is not a one-to-one
replacement. It requires new administrative actions by the sysadmin
and by the user to validate who they want to get mail from.
The sysadmin effort would be setting up an automated way to hand out
keys, and the user would have a one-time (or very infrequently) effort
to establish a key pair. All the processing would then be automatic. If
the message couldn't be decrypted, or the signature verification
returned the wrong result, the message would simply be dropped. This
keeps everyone except the originator and receiver out of the content
inspection business, yet provides the receiver with an undeniable link
back to the originator for anything that gets delivered. When the
receiver decides that the content wastes resources, they get to decide
the appropriate action to take against the identified origin.
This approach does not prevent spam, because the spammer could set up
their own public key service. It does keep the IETF out of defining spam
and how to identify & filter it, the service provider out of the
business of content inspection, and has a fairly straight forward set of
technical bounds to build products against. It increases the cost to the
spammer by seriously reducing the number of messages per minute they can
send, and it creates a traceable record to the spammer (well at least to
the key service). Existing legal infrastructure should be sufficient
from there, but I can imagine that politicians would want to claim they
were doing something about the problem and might dream up new laws, or
mandates to deploy such a technology (I am not arguing they should, just
predicting their actions).
Tony