Hi, Ed,
I don't know everything about e-mail, although I do send and receive
e-mail from time to time.
I would be interested in reading reasons from others why this is a bad
idea. It seems interesting to me.
The only thing I'm wondering about is, since all the press reports
about recent viruses say they set up zombie networks, I'm wondering if
placing a CPU burden on someone who controls 100,000 PCs is harder
than you think...
Spencer
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Gerck" <egerck(_at_)nma(_dot_)com>
To: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2004 6:05 PM
Subject: proposal for built-in spam burden & email privacy protection
Email privacy and spam are such general problems today that I'd
like to ask the ietf-org list for feedback (private if you wish)
on this suggestion. There are more specific forums where this
can (and shall) be discussed.
Suppose:
1. I make my public-key available wherever my email address is
given;
2. Except for senders in a whitelist (e.g., list mail), I bounce to
the sender
any email that is NOT encrypted with my public-key, providing my
public-key and instructions for the sender to resubmit the message
properly encrypted.
This would make spammers pay FOR EACH message sent, as messages
would need to be encrypted FOR EACH recipient. At the same time, it
would promote email privacy protection en route, including at ISPs
and before mail pickup at POP boxes.
The end points would not be authenticated at this time, making it
much
simpler to implement. Sender authentication is also not effective as
a
burden mechanism for each message.
The built-in spam burden & email privacy protection afforded by this
procedure would not be costly to use as there are several free tools
available for encryption. The whitelist should provide a backward
path
for those who don't want or can't use encryption at this time.
Comments?
Cheers,
Ed Gerck
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