Subject: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses them all

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:23:37 -0500

Every good scientist makes observations first, forms a hypothesis, and then
tests it. It's the scientific method, and I think we should be using it
here.

Observations:
1) Spam only comes from those we don't know. (If it does come from those we
do, then it might not be spam)

2) We trust those that we know. The opposite is also true.

3) Content filters are unacceptable; 99% of the people don't know how to
work them, and you CAN'T install them for someone (I.e. Filtering on the
mail server by admins is not permissible- both privacy and reliability
concerns)

4) Spam pays because it's cheap

5) Spammers don't care who they are, or who you are - BUT the receivers do.

6) Spammers don't play fair, and bend the rules. Social engineering, filter
evasion, etc.

{Feel free to add some more}

Theory:
From all the above, but mainly 5, we can get a solution. If we make the
spammer at least appear credible, even for a short while, then they can be
limited (controlled).

Spamming involves sending out junk mail messages at a fast rate. The faster,
the better for the spammer. Rate throttling only works until they learn to
parallelism their operation(s)

However if we make the spammer identify themselves (and appear creditable)
we can rope them in and control them.

Here's how. Each message must have a valid from address. This address is
validated against and ISP's database. If the account exists, then the mail
is allowed to be received, otherwise it is thrown in the trash. It's very
much like putting a return address on an envelope, but since
computers/networks are so fast we can verify in real time that it is fast.
Any mail without a return address gets put in the trash (and this is
generally the case in real life too)

In my previous email, I suggested the idea of a "promoted" and "demoted"
char for email addresses to suggest this reverse "authentication" (for lack
of a better word) capability. If the promoted char is used, the messages is
reverse authenticated, if it passes, it keeps (or if all messages are
authenticated) the promoted char is used. Else it gets demoted to '@'. There
is no real functional reason aside form sorting that the new char is needed.
Indeed prompted char can equal demoted char.

Anonymity can still be protected. Anonymity at the very least proves
legitimate existence, which is all we need to know.

Example:
Yahoo.com (or whomever) will be getting all these requests for
[email-masked] and saying 'account does not exist', and the mail will be
demoted (with possible deletion)

Problem #1:
[email-masked] is real, but did not send the message (spoofed addr).

Solution #1:
The outgoing mail server will have to see what addresses [email-masked]
did send to that haven't been verified ("authenticated") yet. If it gets a
request from an account that was not sent to, then it sends an 'account does
not exist' message. This will cause the spoofed message to be rejected,
while not allowing the existence of an account to be determined by a
malicious entity.

Problem #2:
Spammer sets up a domain (or at least a server) to do his bidding. He sets
up 1 to 1000 accounts all to spam, or a rogue server to verify ANY auth
attempts.

Solution #2:
In order for any to get through to the recipient, they have to be
"authenticated"  (reverse look-up now comes to mind as a better term). If he
allows this, then he has identified himself as a source, (he can be traced
back) and measures by his ISP can force him off the net. Also note that
generally there are a fixed number of ISPs, and they can flag his credit
card/account as to not give that card an account. After a while, all the
cards will be used, and all the ISPs will know the all the cards/accounts.

Problem #3:
"Fly by night" or "dump" operations - spam and move

Solution #3:
The spammer has to be there long enough for the bulk of his messages to get
"authenticated". This puts him on the net and ties him down to an address
long enough to be caught/blacklisted/whatever. It also means that his
machine must be able to handle the stampede of "authentications" that will
be coming back. Spammers in this instance may actually throttle themselves
back, lest their incoming slow their outgoing.

This system seems easily implemented, and will go a long way to
eliminate/cut down/make filterable the spam.

Note: that once this "authentication" is implemented, it can be extended
with full-out crypto (where legal) or other capabilities. Example:
undeliverable messages. The advanced server can count the undeliverables
coming back for and address and flag the sender as a spammer. You can also
limit the number of messages sent or received per account rather easily once
this infrastructure is in place. (Note: this is now optional in my head)

The one argument against:
Resources- email addresses are short, and easily stored for a "short" time
(for solution #2). The authentication process need not be long or wordy. It
is anticipated that a few spam messages dropped by this scheme will more
than make up for hundreds of authentications (characters by volume)

One other wary point: A spammer can validate an email address by sending a
message and watch for the bounce back authentication request. Therefore all
queries must be as anonymous as possible, and preferably proxied outside the
recipient's domain. This doesn't "fix" the problem, but it does throttle
them back severely. Of course, most forums and newsgroups and email lists
already reveal your address...

Thoughts/comments welcome.

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:53:18 -0500

> 1) Spam only comes from those we don't know.

false.  sometimes spam comes from people who do know me, but 
want to annoy me.
 
> 2) We trust those that we know. The opposite is also true.

False.  knowing someone does not imply trusting him.  knowledge can
often justify distrust.  neither does not knowing someone indicate that
they're not trustworthy.

> 3) Content filters are unacceptable;

false.  content filters are ideal for getting rid of certain
kinds of content.  I can write a filter that reliably recognizes
languages that I cannot read, or attachments that I have zero use for
(like windows executables) and it's perfectly reasonable for me to
discard such things.

what's less reasonable is having someone else discard those things
for me.

> 4) Spam pays because it's cheap

not all spam is connercial.  and spam would exist even if it were
more expensive - it would just be more narrowly targeted.

> 5) Spammers don't care who they are, or who you are - BUT the

false.  some spam is targeted.
 
> 6) Spammers don't play fair, and bend the rules. Social engineering,
> filter evasion, etc.

spammers don't think there are rules.

Keith

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:03:26 -0500

Bah, you're barking up the wrong trees.

As I stated, you cannot rely on user filters. There needs to be an
infrastructure-level solution. Filters are fine once the user gets the
message, the infrastructure should strip out illegitimate messages in the
first place.

As your comments:
1) The definition may vary. But if you have friends that want to annoy you,
get new friends, and filter them out. That is, if you can reliably filter
them... (and I challenge you to do so if you can't trust the 'from'
address!)

2) You're taking the word trust way too seriously. Think "be willing to
accept a message from"

3) Here, you are WAAAAAAAAAAY off, and wrong, wrong, wrong! You cannot
assume that what works for you works for others. I'd hate to lose legit mail
to me because it worked for some filter of yours. That said, I think there
is only one filter that we could ever use, and that is that the From: field
must be legit. (minimally not blank)

4) Mute point

5) Whatever.

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Moore [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 12:53 PM
To: Jason Hihn
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
them all

Keith

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:26:06 -0500

> As I stated, you cannot rely on user filters.

filters are perfectly reliable for some things.  user filters
are not ideal because the infrastructure still has to carry the
messages, but it's misleading to say that they're not reliable.

> There needs to be an infrastructure-level solution. Filters are fine
> once the user gets the message, the infrastructure should strip out
> illegitimate messages in the first place.

who decides what is illegitimate?

> As your comments:
> 1) The definition may vary. But if you have friends that want to annoy
> you, get new friends, and filter them out. That is, if you can
> reliably filter them... (and I challenge you to do so if you can't
> trust the 'from' address!)

filters don't have to be perfectly reliable to be useful.  (some people 
have big enough egos that they won't change their from addresses, so
it's still useful to filter on their addresses.)

as for your challenge - just as an example, I'm willing to accept a
pgp-signed message from someone I trust as long as I can verify the
signature, and I don't care what the From address is.

> You cannot assume that what works for you works for others. 

I don't assume that.  I agree with you entirely that filters have to be
recipient-specific.  however that doesn't mean that they have to be
implemented at the recipient's end.

> That said, I think there is only one filter that we could ever use,
> and that is that the From: field must be legit. (minimally not blank)

there are probably a few others, but not many.

Keith

---

From: "Jon Kyme" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 18:18:29 +0000

> Any mail without a return address gets put in the trash (and this is

Sadly, the network isn't guaranteed to be either fast or reliable.
A system like this has to cope with "TEMPFAIL" type situations.

Also this kind of technique imposes a cost on victims of forged from
addresses. This has been covered before (so why am I saying it again?)
While this isn't a fatal objection - it doesn't seem at all fair.

--

---

From: Tony Finch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 19:07:10 +0000

>1) Spam only comes from those we don't know. 

Not if it's forged, Outlook worms being the most common example.

>eliminate/cut down/make filterable the spam.

SMTP callout address verification is already in use, although it isn't
a complete solution owing to the number of servers out there that do
recipient address checking very late. It also causes problems because
of the number of servers that do not accept email with a null reverse
path, and the number of users that want to receive email from people
with broken setups. It relies on SMTP servers leaking information about
valid addresses, which some don't like from a privacy point of view,
and others don't like because it makes dictionary attacks easier.

Your scheme implies (somewhat unclearly) a per-message component to
the checking, which would require me to tell all my MXs (or some other
authoritative entity in my domain) about all the email I send so that
the recipients can check it.

Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch  <[email-masked]>  http://dotat.at/
CAPE WRATH TO RATTRAY HEAD INCLUDING ORKNEY: SOUTHWEST 6 OR 7, EASING 4 OR 5,
THEN VEERING NORTH OR NORTHEAST 7 OR GALE 8. SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD. ROUGH,
LOCALLY VERY ROUGH OR HIGH LATER.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:37:18 -0700 (MST)

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>

> ...
> ...

Ok, but another of your messages seemed to be trying to define "consent"
in terms of individual filters.  I think that is a bad idea.

"Consent" should not include notions such as "has a From header value
that is valid according to RFC 2822 and a body no larger than 10
KBytes."  The mail that you consent to must to be tied to its sender
more than to its superficial technical characteristics.

It would be nice to be able to consent to some messages smaller than
10 KBytes from a sender but not to larger messages, but that sort
of thing is an infinite rat hole.

A problem with the technical characteristics definition of consent is
exemplified by one of your examples.  Consent needs to be something
that can be easily communicated with the message itself (perhaps by
reference) and checked potentially checked earlier than the target's
user interface.  Your example of the more than dozen technical
characteristics fails this criterion so badly I first thought it was
a joke.

An expression of "consent" must not require a MByte in a Turing-complete
language.  Even a statement in a first-order predicate calculus is
too complex.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:36:47 -0500

I'm not concerned. Get the spam off the net, and watch reliability go up.
;-)

I don't think the resources required to implement temp fail to be that
substantial.
Furthermore, currently victims of forged addresses have to face the wrath of
the receivers of the forged email. This way, the email would be rejected.

Once this solution was in wide-enough adoption, forged addresses would be
useless and pointless anyway, thereby making it a mute point.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Kyme [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 1:18 PM
To: Jason Hihn
Cc: ASRG
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
them all

--

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:37:38 -0500

Your filter tactics are insufficient. They bury your head in the sand. Spam
is increasing on the network. It carries a cost, and therefore it increases
costs. To filter it at an end-point does nothing to deliver us from the
costs of delivering it.

It must be a network-centric method and not an end point method that is used
to reduce spam.
By using filters, (lets say) 1/4 of all traffic being email and 80% of email
traffic ends up in the filter's trash can. That's convertible to a dollar
figure. And that is waste. Filters do nothing to reduce the costs and
wastes. You can try ignoring spam, but it keeps coming.

I'd support filters if they only did the tar-pit type of thing. Because
there no one loses a message, it just takes forever if the filter is wrong.
But I digress...

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Moore [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 1:26 PM
To: Jason Hihn
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
them all

Keith

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:37:10 -0500

Absolutely. This is the only way it could work. It costs money & resources
to fight a war. I firmly believe that the costs of fighting this war
outweigh the expenses of not fighting it.

Yes, there is some leakage, but no more than can be found by going through
newsgroups, BBSs, mailing list archives and the like...

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Finch [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Tony
Finch
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 2:07 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
them all

Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch  <[email-masked]>  http://dotat.at/
CAPE WRATH TO RATTRAY HEAD INCLUDING ORKNEY: SOUTHWEST 6 OR 7, EASING 4 OR
5,
THEN VEERING NORTH OR NORTHEAST 7 OR GALE 8. SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD.
ROUGH,
LOCALLY VERY ROUGH OR HIGH LATER.

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 16:39:26 -0500

>while not allowing the existence of an account to be determined by a

This assumes a pretty complex infrastructure mapping between all 
possible sending servers and receiving servers for the same domain. 
And until everyone has updated their mail servers, the false positive 
rate is going to be huge, so you don't dare block on it.

So once again you have a system which nobody has an incentive to move 
to until it's been deployed by the majority of users.

Let me propose a rule for proposals.

No proposal without an explanation of the incentives for the senders 
and receivers to adopt the system at three stages:  10%, 50% and 90% 
deployed.  And at each stage, explain what actions the spammers are 
being forced to take.

I would argue that a system that offers no benefits until you've 
passed the 50% point is never going to be adopted.

On the other hand.  A system which is virtually guaranteed to fail at 
the 90% point (challenge/response, possibly content filters) can 
demonstrably shown to have early adopters because, while it may fail 
when scaled, it works now.

Let's try and leverage those social forces.  (My anthro advisor would 
be proud :-)
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 16:34:09 -0700 (MST)

> From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>

> deployed.  And at each stage, explain what actions the spammers are 

That omits the most important stages at 0.01%, 0.1%, and 1% measured
in target mailboxes protected or total mail scanned.  0.01% is 50,000
mailboxes, which the size of a modest regional ISP or a large company.
It's not easy to convince the people responsible at such outfits to
risk wasting their time and effort on something that turns out to be
like almost all anti-spam solutions, either not worth the effort (<80%
effective) or fine if you don't care about false positives or scaling.
It's not easy even to get the first 0.0001% or 500 mailboxes protected
by months of flogging a solution in slashdot, freshmeat, spam-l, and
news.admin.net-abuse.email, but it is possible.  It turns out that
people in those forums are more interested in talking about spam
solutions than installing them.  It is quite difficult to reach 0.1%
or 500,000 mailboxes, because you must convince more than the handful
of anti-spam and anti-spammer hobbyists who can choose their own mail
software.

> passed the 50% point is never going to be adopted.

That's optimistic by more than a factor of 10.  Even 1% is probably
too high a threshold.  Something that is useless until 5% has no hope
unless you do the impossible and convince an AOL to use a solution
invented outside.  Even an AOL is only about 5%.

> when scaled, it works now.

That's 1000X optimistic.  As far as I can tell, one body checksum
scheme has failed or been retired.  There may have been other reasons,
but it was having scaling problems at 0.09% despite getting a lot of
attention from early adopter hobbyists.

> Let's try and leverage those social forces.  (My anthro advisor would 

Or at least admit they exist and be realistic about them.

Note that these claims are based not only on my prejudices but also
my experiencd with the DCC for the last two years.  I figure the DCC
has reached 0.5% or conceivably a little more.

How many contributors to this list have any experience pushing spam
solutions at or above the 0.01% deployed level?  What about 0.1%? 
I don't want to offend, but to emphasize what I understand as part
of Kee Hinckley's point, that spam suffers from the talk-is-cheap
syndrome in more than one way.

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 09:58:07 -0500

Combine this with my first thread, the alternate character thread, and you
have something for  your 10, 50, and 90 percent deployment. You also have an
easy way for anyone to adopt the new system and interact with legacy
systems.

At any percentage the emails you get are known non-spam.

There is one goal: to eliminate spam. If you want social implications at 10,
50 and 90 percent then you are missing the point. Social implications are
irrelevant. Economic ones are the only ones that drive anything. I don't
care if Joe Blow wants a new spam proof email system - he doesn't control
his mail servers. His ISP does. And his ISP doesn't want to pay for spam.
Even if it costs him 15% more than non-spam email (assuming 80% of email is
spam) that's still significant cost reduction.

Or you can look at it this way: Once widely adopted and spam eliminated, if
you were to downgrade to the old system, you'd incur more cost (though the
cost per email is less) due to your permitting of spam. Ask anyone if they'd
like to do that, and they'll ask you "are you crazy?"

Am I making any kind of sense?

-----Original Message-----
From: Kee Hinckley [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 4:39 PM
To: Jason Hihn
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
them all

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 12:50:31 -0500

>spam) that's still significant cost reduction.

Call it social or economic, it's the same thing.  So, let's look at 
the incentives to the ISP.

The ISP installs a system that keeps track of all outbound messages 
and who they went to (is that legal in the EU?) and sets up code to 
respond to verifications.  It then also sets up code to verify all 
incoming mail against the sender's database.

When this is the only ISP to have implemented this service, how many 
spam messages do they block?  Zero.

When 10% of the ISPs have implemented this system, how many spam 
messages do they block?  Far less than 10%.  Because of course, most 
spammers aren't sending from these ISPs in the first place--and they 
certainly aren't sending from these ISPs once they've implemented the 
system.

So. You are asking the ISP to gamble that this technology is the one 
that will be deployed world-wide.  And you are further asking them to 
make this outlay with the full knowledge that the system will not be 
useful until the majority of the world is using it.  Because until 
that time, it is not practical to block messages that don't verify.

It's not going to happen.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 13:10:43 -0500

I don't share in your pessimism. If we can make reasonable assurances that
in 5 years spam is a thing of the past, then I think we'll hop on board.

According to your logic, we should never buy houses because it will never
pay off. We should just stick to renting, because it's cheap and it works
well enough.

Yeah, right.

> Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 12:51 PM
> To: Jason Hihn
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: RE: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addresses
> them all
>
>

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 11:19:03 -0700 (MST)

> From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>

> in 5 years spam is a thing of the past, then I think we'll hop on board.

If that were true, we would all be using IPv6.  More than 5 years ago
we all agreed that IPv6 was a good thing and that we all may as well
get on with the transition.  The optimists said that the transition
would happen by either 2005 or 2013, I don't remember now which.  If
it was 2005, they were clearly wrong.

> pay off. We should just stick to renting, because it's cheap and it works

That is nonsense, because the benefits of buying a house are almost
but not entirely independent of how many other people also buy houses.

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 14:16:57 -0500

>pay off. We should just stick to renting, because it's cheap and it works

I'll try one more time.

1. The benefits of buying a house are immediate.
2. The benefits of buying a house do not depend on everyone else 
buying a house.
3. The buyer of a house is not faced with a choice of multiple 
houses, only one of which will be liveable in five years.

If those were not the case--people would rent.

I think maybe you're thinking that it isn't a gamble, because all the 
ISPs will get together and agree to do something.  But that won't 
happen, because there are plenty of ISPs who aren't going to play the 
game.  If we could rely on all the ISPs to agree on something, we 
wouldn't have a problem right now, because they would have agreed not 
to allow spammers on their networks.  However there are clearly ISPs, 
and entire countries, who have decided that it is to their benefit to 
spam.  Other's are caught in unfortunately legal agreements.  Still 
others simply don't know they are being taken advantage of.  Your 
proposal is not going to change any of that, and it won't be 
effective until the number of authenticated messages so overwhelms 
the non-authenticated that we can afford to block them.  Read what 
people have said about acceptable false-positive rates.

Alternatively, you believe that if we make it a standard, they will 
come.  There are lots of standards out there.  Lots of RFCs.  Which 
one will be implemented is a completely different question.  Back in 
1989 I co-founded a company that made a multimedia email client and 
server that ran on Unix.  There was a Unix desktop standard.  RFC1154 
gave us a standard for multimedia attachments.  And for those people 
who were going to use the new international standard for email, 
X.400, we supported that as well.  Everyone agreed that Unix on the 
desktop was going to take off and the standards organizations were 
all pointing at X.400 as the future.  We made that gamble because we 
were three guys working out of our living rooms.  Established 
companies don't take that kind of risk.  The payoff is not worth it. 
And in that case they would have been right.  MIME replaced RFC1154. 
Unix *still* isn't a desktop operating system.  And X.400 died a 
well-deserved death.

I think authentication is the way to go as well.  But we have to find 
a method that has immediate benefits to the people who have to do the 
work and pay the cost.  That's why I'm focused on the idea of 
requiring authentication only for bulk mailers, and using existing 
tools to identify what messages are bulk.  I'm not convinced that it 
will work.  But I am convinced that it applies the changes in the 
places where people are incented to make them.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 14:54:02 -0500

> Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 2:17 PM
> To: Jason Hihn
> Cc: [email-masked]
I think we've killed the own/rent annalogy.. moving on...
> people have said about acceptable false-positive rates.

I don't need or care that 90% (by domain? by email addr?) haven't deployed
it.
If Yahoo!, aol, MSN, hotmail, and comcast were to implement it, 90% of whom
I correspond with would be covered, excluding my mailing list buddies of
course! Also, there would be no messages from fake yahoo.com addresses
littering my mail box.

...

> places where people are incented to make them.

The problem is, who is a bulk mailer? I can change my identity. What
messages are bulk? There are a lot more holes in that tin can than my idea.
I can vary the message a little for each destination. I can inter-twine
several different messages (porn, penis enlargement, fat reduction, repeat)
to throw off your detection. How are you going to force me to play by your
rules? Why should I care to play by them in the first place if my messages
end up in the trash can?

My method answers that last one nicely. If you don't play by my rules, I
WON'T ever see it. If you do play, you at least have some chance that I
might see it, but it's still not likely.

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 16:52:27 -0500

>I don't need or care that 90% (by domain? by email addr?) haven't deployed

By whichever the proposal needs to be deployed.

>course! Also, there would be no messages from fake yahoo.com addresses

If you authenticate on envelope from there'd be no email messages 
with a fake yahoo.com email address in the envelope.  What goes in 
the Return-Path: and From: is an entirely different matter.  If you 
authenticate on the headers you've got a major problem with 
acceptance.  I suspect Hotmail and Yahoo would actually fight the 
system, since a large percentage of their users are probably sending 
from their ISP, but using the web mail address as the return address.

But the fact that majority of your correspondents would be covered 
does not mean that any of those sites can stop blocking email from 
anyone who doesn't respond.  So the spammers just use different 
addresses.  Furthermore, even you can't block based on 
non-authentication--because those few emails you get from outside of 
those systems are probably from ecommerce sites.  You've got to get 
them on board as well.

>rules? Why should I care to play by them in the first place if my messages

The mechanism assumes that we can successfully defeat checksum 
breakers for long enough to bring more complete authentication on 
board.  I'm not sure if that is true or not.

>might see it, but it's still not likely.

That's correct.  Or to put it another way.  Your system penalizes the 
early adopters, because they will miss lots of important email.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 17:20:55 -0500

> Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 4:52 PM
> To: Jason Hihn
> Cc: [email-masked]

No. This has already been addressed. But to refresh: Just use a
promoted/demoted character. See previous email for fanciful things you can
do to make the users like it more.

Eventually it is up to the receiver's domain to choose to drop or demote. As
someone who works with and uses automated emailers, I fully understand the
concerns here. But the interesting thing is you can expect what automailers
will be talking to you...

---

From: mathew <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 21:09:41 -0500

I came up with a possible spam solution that had quite a bit in common 
with Jason Hihn's proposal.  Of course, I think mine's better in some 
important respects, but I would, wouldn't I? :-)

However, I'm not going to write it up, because it has the same problem 
as Jason's: there's no clear route from here to there.  It requires 
e-mail to be sent via a fundamentally different protocol, rather than 
SMTP. There's no gain for early adopters, just expense and a limited 
audience.

It strikes me that there might be a way to get such a thing rolled out, 
however. Just don't call it e-mail.

For years now, we've been waiting for a unifying instant messaging and 
presence system. What if one was built, and it also had "delayed 
instant messages", which used this new e-m**l protocol that was 
spam-resistant?

Initially people would use the new system as their IM system; since 
there's not much good competition in IM, it wouldn't be impossible to 
give early adopters a clear gain. People are used to running IM 
alongside their existing e-mail client.  Then as time went on, they'd 
start using the unified IM system for the messages currently sent by 
e-mail...

If we got assistance from the big boys (like AOL), we could get 
interoperability with the current IM systems. That would be a massive 
gain that would drive rapid adoption.

mathew
-- 
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/>