From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com>
...
Most of it is. But that's not an incredibly interesting point: I think
we can all agree that there is a lot of spam that is forged and there
is a lot of spam that isn't forged. There is too much of either type.
It sometimes seems like people are saying "it's no use going after spam
that's forged as there's always the non-forged type" but then also
"it's no use to go after non-forged spam because spammers simply forge
headers to get by filters". May I suggest taking logic 101 again for
those of you who think this makes sense?
That is a red herring. That forgery is not a required part of spam
does not imply that stopping forged spam is useless. However, many
people are uninterested in mechanisms that reduce their own spam loads
by less than 80%. Few care about mechanisms that would stop only 50%,
not to mention 15%.
If you watch much spam without religious blinders, you know
that the religion that enough ISPs care about spam is delusional.
If an ISP doesn't yank the mail identity from people that spam and/or
lets spam through from known spammers, that would be a good reason to
require additional validation for identities used by customers of this
ISP.
That is an intersting point, but only if you think that ISPs that
don't care enough about spam today to yank accounts (even of
resellers) will bother to provide any of the things that might be
called "additional validation of identities." Otherwise, you may
as well permanently blacklist those ISPs by their IP addresses with
supplemental whitelists of your correspondents that patronize them,
and declare victory in the spam war.
Most of the anti-forgery proposals depend on ISPs doing lots expensive
work with the intended result in many cases of preventing spammers from
using the services of the ISPs that would do that work and today are
not terminating those same accounts....talk about a need for Logic 101!
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com