"Robert G. Brown" wrote:
On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Ed Gerck wrote:
We can't lock the
spammers' doors everywhere, we have to lock our door at our house.
No, what we can do is the same thing we do with our real mail box. Make
it illegal to send certain classes of mail, for example letter bombs and
envelopes containing anthrax, and prosecute the hell out of anybody we
catch who does so.
On the flip side, this is a good example of how the anthrax threat was
not handled. The solution was not to rely on the illegality of sending
anthrax (which, obviously, wasn't enough of a deterrent) or the probability
of prosecuting the sender (which we have not yet done), but on a "lock"
that was put on all mail coming in. Mail that came from unknown senders
was more carefully verified and even sterilized, some was backtraced and
the sender was verified.
But postal mail, contrary to email, cannot put a burden on the
sender that is higher than the postage cost. Email, rather than
being cost-free for all senders, can be made expensive to senders
we don't know. And the way to do it mandatorily is by using code --
not law.
This is useful because our email is laced with the "anthrax" called
spam. Filtering by subject line, email headers and body text is not
enough, and frequently backfires by making us delay and even not
read what would otherwise be a message of interest.
BTW, the technique of imposing a task that burdens the sender in
order to reduce interference due to rogue senders has a parallel
in spread-spectrum technology, for example. By only receiving messages
that are frequency-keyed as expected, my receiver can withstand
jamming (i.e., noise messages that are in-band -- "spam"). This
is in addition to other filters I have for post-processing.