On zondag, sep 7, 2003, at 21:45 Europe/Amsterdam, Dean Anderson wrote:
Information theory says that such things are impossible. One can not
construct a spam-free protocol because this is the same problem as
constructing a system free of covert channels, which information theory
says is impossible.
Nobody cares. Making a roof 100.000000% impervious to water molecules
may be impossible, but that doesn't mean we have to resign to getting
wet every time it rains.
It is not simply hard. It is impossible, like perpetual motion.
So when exactly was the earth supposed to stop moving?
After I first posted this on IETF a while back, someone suggested that
covert channels require cooperation, and that spam therefore isn't a
covert channel.
Where does this covert channel stuff come from anyway?
But this is a simpler way to think about it: Spammers can continue to
claim they are legitimate emailers, because they _ARE_ legitimate, so
far
as we know before they send email. And even so far as we know _before_
someone _READS_ their email. Only after reading their email, and
perhaps
only after some investigation, can we know for sure that the sender and
message is conducting abuse or in violation of their AUP.
This goes for each individual message, but the spammer's achilles heel
is that they need to send out incredible amounts of email in order to
fulfill their objectives, whichever those are. Detecting bulk mail is
doable, and it shouldn't be too hard to come up with something to
differentiate legitimate bulk emailing from spam. For instance, we can
reverse the burden of proof here and only allow know bulk emailers.
However, I looked at your proposal, and it appears that you are trying
to
create a "pull" mechanism rather than a "push" mechanism for message
delivery . This paradigm has already been implemented as "Usenet News".
My point exactly except that usenet doesn't have to be significantly
more "pull" than email (where you need your client to check for new
mail as well).
It is not immune to spam, though it distributes spam and other
broadcast
messages much more efficiently than typical email systems.
Ouch! :-)
Fixable with authentication.