I agree with the idea of a BOF, but 'anti-spam' is the wrong focus. Spam
is a social problem, not an engineering one.
If by "social problem" you mean that it is a problem that results from human
behavior, like lack of a widespread social contract or failure to adhere to a
social contract for how to use email, I might agree. But applying that term
doesn't help much. Nor should it be taken to imply that there is not a
technical solution, or part of a solution, to the problem. Traffic signals,
speed measuring radar, lojack, airport metal detectors, turnstiles, locks on
doors, and alarm systems are all technical approaches to social problems.
Clearly, a lot of spam can be eliminated via technical mechanisms. Social
and/or legal mechanisms might also help especially if they have technical
mechanisms to back make them more feasible (e.g. by making senders tracable
with less effort, and perhaps, by reducing the number of complaints that have
to be investigated). Technical, social, and legal mechanisms all have
disadvantages and costs. Often addressing a problem with a combination of
mechanisms yields a more acceptable solution than insisting on a single kind
of mechanism.
I contend that is why we
already have a research group dealing with it (social problems are
inherently difficult for engineers, thus requiring research to figure
out). Focus the group on a tangible engineering problem, deployable
authenticated email. Or as Vixie labeled the more generic, interpersonal
batch communication system.
If we are trying to solve the spam problem, we'll be disappointed if
'deployable authenticated mail' or 'interpersonal batch communication system'
doesn't solve that problem. And as far as I can tell, neither one will. We
need to understand the benefits and limitations of these approaches before we
invest a lot of work into them.
What users seem to want is to be able to accept mail from anyone without much
or any sender-specific prior arrangement (because we want to avoid the hassles
of making such arrangements, and because sometimes it really is useful to get
mail from people we don't know yet), to send mail for free or extremely low
cost, and to not have our mailboxes cluttered up with messages we don't want
to see (or for that matter, viruses). There are a lot of other constraints,
but these are the big ones. It may not be possible to completely satisfy this
set of constraints, but it might be that a slightly different set of
constraints would be acceptable. It might also be that different constraints
(with different results) are acceptable to different people.