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Re: Engineering to deal with the social problem of spam

2003-06-03 03:44:47
Iljitsch writes:

The trouble is that on the internet, you can go
from house to house and try to break locks and
nobody will stop you. In the real world, you
wouldn't be able to do that for very long.

Sure you could.  But locks break so easily in the real world that most
crooks don't have to bother.

Spam is so much out of control that any individual
spam isn't going to have much of a return, so they
need to send out even more of it.

Since the cost of sending spam is negligeable, sending ten or fifteen
million more isn't likely to be much of a deterrent.

So let's show some adaptability of our own and
plug those SMTP holes.

Why does SMTP have "holes"?  It does what it is supposed to.  There isn't
any way to automatically recognize spam, since it looks just like any other
e-mail to a computer.

Someone's "home MTA" sould be able to simply rate
limit the number of messages an individual user gets
to inject into the global email distribution system.

This assumes that the home MTA has an objective of limiting outgoing spam.
But ISPs used by spammers aren't likely to care what they send out, as long
as they pay their bills.