excuse me but...
One reason why spam works is that it is so cheap to send 1M messages
...
There may be a Principle there, about any "cost" imposed upon
spammers tending to reduce the spam problem...
...
Yes, that is what I had in mind; use any means available to make it
unattractive; persuade them to turn their attention to some other
technology.
...
Something along the lines of 'Know your enemy' comes to mind; get hold of
...the point of the original post was to identify principles. discussions
among this engineering-centric community are naturally about methods. the
principle i've always followed is that "all communications must be by mutual
consent" and i havn't seen anything in this thread to tell me there's some
more-universal or more-relevant way to approach it.
the messaging protocols we use today do not encode consent in any way. that's
why <http://mail-abuse.org/standard.html> is written exactly the way it is.
if the protocols could reliably ensure consent, then the definition of abuse
could be much more broad.
improving authentication sure feels like it's a good way to make consent more
likely, but let's not lose sight of the principle, which is consent, while
we deal with methods, like authentication.
--
Paul Vixie