----- Original Message -----
From: "Seth Goodman" <sethg(_at_)GoodmanAssociates(_dot_)com>
To: <spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com>
Sent: Saturday, August 07, 2004 7:24 AM
<big snip>
Exactly who is going to bring all these lawsuits once we "identify" the
spammers? The largest ISP's have gone after a few dozen spammers in
high-profile cases. While it is certainly the right thing to do, these
few companies cannot by themselves win this fight. SPF will make it
easier for us to blacklist spamming domains and do so more quickly, but
let's not kid ourselves about there being legal consequences for most
spammers - at least in the U.S.
And it's no better anywhere else - everyone is waiting for the USA to
provide the lead in "what to do about spam" - but the answer seems to be
pass loads of laws, but don't provide any facility for anyone to enforce
them. I'm familiar with British, Irish, Spanish and some east European
countries and there is no chance that a spammer is ever going to be caught
and locked up. Bear in mind that the spammers are usually individuals and
the huge fines will mean nothing because he/she won't be able to pay anyway,
so they *might* get locked up in a comfortable jail with full acces to all
mod-cons like on-line computers!!
I sometimes wonder what we are doing with e-mail on the www - it was *never*
designed to do the things it's doing now. Huge multi-megabyte files and
so-on are as bad as spam. I am involved with looking after a network and
servers and clients and all - and I am amazed how e-mail is abused.
Bandwidth is *still* a limited and expensive resource, and we squander it
like it's someone else's problem! For big stuff I tell my clients to use
ftp, and set them up with a simple file upload/download facility on a
website, and for mail - well I am rapidly reaching the point where the only
mail I will get will be from addresses on my white-list, anyone else who
wants to e-mail me will need to use a website form to make the initial
contact.
SPF is definitely an excellent way forward, but *please* lets not get bogged
down - make it work for anything microsoft and that will kill probably 90%
of spam. I'm an open-source fanatic, but also a realist ;-)
And - BTW - many thanks to all the guys who have put in the excellent work
in getting spf this far - a really fantastic job :-)
Slainte,
JohnP.
johnp(_at_)idimo(_dot_)com
ICQ 313355492