SPF was brought up in a surgemail list and a fellow
that owns and manages a good size ISP wrote an intestering
piece and some entertaing views.
With all the seriousness, I thought everyone could use some
levity. (And he makes some good points.)
Regards,
Brad
copied email below >>>>
Subject: RE: Bath Room Reading
After reading that SPF will stop most spam, I checked the last spam I
deleted. The kind folks were offering to stretch my snubnose into a
magnum...for a nominal fee. (I tracked them down to Panda Communications
here in the US.)
The message came from a legitimate yahoo account. I suspect the account will
be disabled shortly. But, the email would not have been stopped by any
anti-spam measure since it was a manually signed up account.
Now, let me think about all this for a minute.
Yahoo wants to set up a system to insure hte sender is a trusted sender and
wants me to get on board. Why would I NOT want to do this? Easy.
Yahoo let that mail through to me. The products were on a yahoo web server.
Yahoo was making money on the web service. Yahoo made money on the
advertising. Do you think Yahoo loses money on spammers? No.
Yahoo makes money by selling advertising. They make money if the mail is
from your Sweetie promising something special for desert tonight or, from
Chang Kai Sheila, promising to stretch Willy to where he will wrap around
your legs twice below the knees, come back up over your shoulder and park in
your ear on command. Yahoo still makes money because the advertiser does not
care if the ad is in letters from the boys on the front lines or the bitches
in the back rooms. It is still advertising. (You don't believe me? Ask the
stockholders. If you announce the company has made millions using spam to
sell products but, now has decided to start using TV to sell the same
products. The bright shareholders will bolt immediately knowing spam
advertising costs are practically nothing compared to TV ad rates. The
shareholders with integrity - spelled suckers - will wait until the stock
price tanks due to lower sales and / or higher cost per sale.) Buy the stock
now! The head of the marketing department is heading for the ten-pin and the
new marketing guru is walking in the door. Hey! Is that a canned ham scrap
in your pocket or are you just glad to meat us?
SPF is going to force people with mailservers to knucle under to the demands
of Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, etc. later.
Most people don't get it. You are a bright fellow. You cannot believe I am a
conspiracy theorist.
The richest man in the country runs one of the most powerful companies on
the planet. He gets sued by every government that can spell lawyer. He loses
every single case that gets to court. All together - total it up; They fine
him less money than he spends giving shots every year to children in other
countries. Everybody feels good! The children feel good because they are not
sick. The politicians feel good because they know Billy G. will keep
contributing (to all of them) and Bill Gates feels great. Hell. He just
fucked 300,000,000 people at once.
AOL hired (appointed? same thing here) a retired General for their board of
directors. Why? Because he was a war hero, of course. Didn't you see him up
there at the Pentagon being a hero during Gulf War One? You don't think they
hired him because his son was at the Federal Communications Commission do
you? Of course not. Anyway. It's just a job. No conflict of interest there
unless they bribed him with millions of dollars in AOL stock. They wouldn't
do that. He must have bought those millions of shares of stock with his
pension. Did I say millions of shares? Gosh! Imagine that. The General
wouldn't have tried to influence his son for millions of dollars. He was a
hero. I saw him shooting. Well. He was shooting pictures of the war but,
that's still shooting. Before they bought the General, AOL was crying (easy
to find public records) to the FCC begging for access to the cable monoploy
lines. Then they stopped. They bought the cable company & started crying to
the FCC about ISPs trying to get on their cable lines. (Also easy to find
public records.) The General becomes Secretary of State and the new company,
"AOL Time Warner," stock goes down the drain costing stockholders about ten
times what Enron cost stockholders. Wait a minute. Who at the FCC championed
the merger? Chairman of the FCC Michael Powell. But, didn't the merger cost
the General tens of millions of dollars when the stock tanked? Let's see.
How much did he pay for the stock? Uh-h. Wait a minute. Where is the zero on
my calculator?
AOL owns Netscape. It is probably the only viable competitor to Internet
Explorer since they are both free. That should make AOL a competitor to
Microsoft. And since AOL sells internet service like MSN...I guess you can
see that one. And since MSN is Microsoft, they are already covered in this
fact-filled spam rant.
Now look at those companies. They all sell advertising. More email means
more hits or impressions for the advertiser. Nothing would have changed if
the spammers had not become so greedy.
Now, the ISPs that sell advertising have to claim they want to stop spam.
Why? so they can charge money for it. It IS all about the money with them.
They cannot afford integrity. They hire slime to help lubricate the path so
we do not feel it so much.
How about a simple solution! If Bill Holt wants to send an email to his
Sweetie expressing his desire for the aformentioned after dinner treat, he
has to pay me a dime. This dime is in his account and I put a hold on it.
the mail goes to Bubba instead of His Sweetie. Bubba sends me a copy and
sure enough Bill seems eager to enjoy Bubba's butt and there is a mention of
expensive jewelry so maybe it IS spam. Bubba wants a nickel. That's what I
offered Bubba to entice him into accepting mail from me. It is a five cent
guarantee that Bubba is not going to get spam from my server. Bubba wins
because he gets a nickel. I win because I also get a nickel. You win because
you are motivated to type better. Later, you decide you didn't win because
after all, it was just an honest mistake.
Anger has built up in you so, in a fit of rage you send 10,000 copies of
mail selling "round tuits," for people waiting to get a round to it. But,
your account only allows you to send about a hundred because that's all the
money in your email escrow account. A few people win a nickle each. I win
abot five bucks and you lose big time. I list you phone number in a database
of people that abuse email. You have lots of trouble getting a new account
with any ISP.
Do you wonder why this will not fly? Cable companies do not use a phone
number for account tracing.
There are lots of ways to stop spam for a while. I wouldn't condone anything
expensive or difficult. As long as people buy pecker stretchers and such
from spammers, the spam will find a way to survive.
SPF will not stop the virus you get every day either. That virus came from a
knology client. They would sail right through SPF. But, do you think knology
would lose ten dollars a day on a computer being run as a zombie by some
spammer. I don't think so.
Part of the problem is the free mailers like netscape and yahoo. It is only
efficient when the labor rate is so low as to allow hand subscribing for the
free email service.
Good Luck with it,
Bill
-------
Sender Policy Framework: http://spf.pobox.com/
Archives at http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss/current/
To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your
subscription,
please go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com