On Jan 29, 2004, at 5:56 PM, Paul Lambert wrote:
Anonymous mail is a valuable service that should be provided by this
effort and not designed away in our fervor to eliminate spam.
-- support for anonymous transport and anonymous headers
disagree strongly. If you want to design a next generation list server
that anonymizes addresses, that's great. If you want the underlying
transport layer to anonymize the transfer of email from one site to
another, you have usenet. no thanks. Part of the reason we're in the
trouble we have today is we can't authenticate and authorize (different
things!) a piece of email and its source. If you allow anonymity to
wander into this process, you simply create the next hole they're going
to jump through.
The server to server communications need to be trustable. if you want a
system that lives on top of that (say, a MLM) that accepts an
identification, obfuscates it, and redistributes that message with the
reputation of the MLM instead of the original poster, that's great.
That's a transfer of reputation, not a removal of one, and you won't
build a system that can stop the spammer unless there's an audit trail
of identity (and/or reputation) unbroken to the source.