Subject: [Asrg] Proposal ....

From: Art Pollard <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 11:32:32 -0700

I recently made a proposal over at slashdot which seemed to garner a fair 
amount of support.

It is this:

When the mail client sends a message, it only goes as far as their local 
mail server.  The local mail server stores the body of the message and then 
sends the header on to the recipient with a ID through which the body may 
be picked up.

When the header arrives at the destination, the client on the other side 
downloads the body of the message from the specified host.

There are a variety of advantages to a system such as this including:

1) There is a server which is responsible for the message that may be 
tracked down.  Forging headers (as spammers now do) will not hide the 
origins of the message.

2) The system administrator on the other end will have time to "cancel" the 
message before it arrives at most of the recipients mailboxes.  (i.e., the 
sysadmin looks and George has 20,000,000 messages in the outbox waiting to 
be picked up. The sysadmin looks at the messages, sees they are spam, then 
he nukes them.)

3) If the messages are nuked before they are picked up, the message header 
is simply thrown away by the mail client or written to a log or put in a 
special mailbox or ... in either case, it is totally transparent to the end 
user and the end user never even knows they have been spammed.

Given this: It would also be possible to develop a self moderation capability.

For example, the sending server has a specific port or reporting mechanism 
and given a: 1) Server ID, 2) User ID, 3) Message ID that is sent to it in 
a "Spam Report" it could verify that the message had actually been sent by 
the user specified and if so could flag it to the sysadmin.  Furthermore, 
if N spam complaints came in for verified messages for a specified user in 
a given period, the account could be automatically put on hold until 
cleared by the sysadmin.

Also, since there is a server which is directly responsible for the 
message, it would be easy to automatically add the server or server/user to 
a blacklist.  Messages from servers that are blacklisted would simply be 
thrown away -- again transparently to the user.

I personally don't believe that any one scheme is going to win the battle 
against spam.  What we need to do is create a framework each node of which 
reinforces all the other nodes in the framework and makes it progressively 
more difficult for spammers to conduct their business.

-Art
-- 
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.

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---

From: Jason Hihn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 14:36:37 -0500

This is good, but I see problems. See injections.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Art
> Pollard
> Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 1:33 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [Asrg] Proposal ....
>

Imagine the server you are picking up from isn't honest. It's a spammers
server.
They now know the email they sent to was valid. Congrats, you've just
verified your email, and that is worth double on the spam market.

---

From: mathew <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 21:16:55 -0500

On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 13:32 US/Eastern, Art Pollard wrote:
> I recently made a proposal over at slashdot which seemed to garner a 
> fair amount of support.
[details deleted]

That's basically the idea I had, which I alluded to in a previous 
message. As I say, the problem is how we get from here to there... I 
think it would need to replace SMTP, not be layered on top of it.

> 2) The system administrator on the other end will have time to 
> "cancel" the message before it arrives at most of the recipients 
> mailboxes.  (i.e., the sysadmin looks and George has 20,000,000 
> messages in the outbox waiting to be picked up. The sysadmin looks at 
> the messages, sees they are spam, then he nukes them.)

And the asshat system administrators who leave their systems as open 
relays will get a "slashdot effect" of spam, as 100,000 spam victims 
call to collect the sales pitch, saturating the open relay machine's 
network connection and maybe even taking it down.  Chances are, most of 
the victims' machines will be unable to get through, and so the spam 
won't appear to those people.

This solves the fundamental problem of SMTP, which is that the cost of 
having an open relay isn't borne by the idiot who has it.  Blacklists 
have attempted to shift the cost onto the enabler, but by changing the 
protocol, you make it inherent that the enabler pays the network cost.

> 3) If the messages are nuked before they are picked up, the message 
> header is simply thrown away by the mail client or written to a log or 
> put in a special mailbox or ... in either case, it is totally 
> transparent to the end user and the end user never even knows they 
> have been spammed.

Yeah. My idea was to have the user client throw out messages if it 
couldn't collect them after a certain time period.

Basically, you change e-mail from push to pull; your e-mail client 
becomes somewhat like an RSS feed reader.

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

---

From: mathew <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 21:20:43 -0500

On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 14:36 US/Eastern, Jason Hihn wrote:
> server. They now know the email they sent to was valid. Congrats, 
> you've just verified your email, and that is worth double on the spam 
> market.

...assuming the current spam market and current infrastructure.

Knowing a million people's e-mail addresses is worth zip if you can't 
deliver spam to them without the sending machine's network connection 
being wiped out, sysadmins alerted, and the sending machine either 
cleared of spam or firewalled by an upstream ISP.

Besides, my e-mail address has been the same for ten years. It's 
"verified" a thousand times over. That's what makes it useful. The 
apparent need to keep your e-mail address secret is one of the problems 
of spam we should be trying to solve.

mathew

---

From: Matt Sergeant <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:38:22 +0000

On Thursday, Mar 13, 2003, at 02:16 Europe/London, mathew wrote:

> network connection and maybe even taking it down.  Chances are, most 
> of the victims' machines will be unable to get through, and so the 
> spam won't appear to those people.

Why wouldn't the spammer do what he does now, and deposit his email on 
1000 open relays, making it only 100 connections to the victim's 
machine (which just looks like a prolific poster)?

Matt.

---

From: mathew <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 22:42:11 -0500

> machine (which just looks like a prolific poster)?

Well, if he can get a list of that many open relays, yes he can do it. 
However, this system can be used in association with open relay 
blocklists, and in practice it would need to be. The advantage over 
what we have today is that it vastly narrows the window of opportunity 
for the spammer.

Today, you connect, send 100,000 spams, and vanish. If the machine you 
used as an open relay gets added to the blocklist, you don't care, 
'cause the spam was already sent.

With reader-fetch, if the open relay gets blocked before I next check 
my mail, I never see the spam.

This brings in the interesting tradeoff that you could reduce the 
amount of spam by making e-mail slower. Some people would still check 
mail every 5 minutes, and would get more spam that way. I'd come home 
from work and log in, and a lot of the spam would already have been 
blocked during the day by diligent sysadmins.

There's also the filtering factor--if you narrow the field to spammers 
who can find 1,000 open relays, you've already filtered out all but the 
most dedicated spammers. I mean, a lot of the spam I get is from people 
who can't work out how to send HTML e-mail...

mathew

---

From: Matt Sergeant <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 10:08:27 +0000

On Friday, Mar 14, 2003, at 03:42 Europe/London, mathew wrote:

> who can find 1,000 open relays, you've already filtered out all but 
> the most dedicated spammers.

I don't think that's true. Most of the ratware available now comes with 
a service that automatically provides you with thousands of open 
proxies through which to send your crap. It downloads the list of 
proxies automatically from the ratware's web site (yes they do get shut 
down, but they pop up again later somewhere).

Matt.

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 09:08:25 -0500

At 10:42 PM -0500 3/13/03, mathew wrote:
>Today, you connect, send 100,000 spams, and vanish. If the machine 
>you used as an open relay gets added to the blocklist, you don't 
>care, 'cause the spam was already sent.

This assumes that a) open relays get added to the list and are 
blocked within a day and b) that people can safely use open relay 
blacklists without false positives.

It seems to me that if those two things were true, then everyone 
would be using open-relay RBLs now.
-- 
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.
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