Subject: Re: [Asrg] Hello- and my 2 cents

From: "Jon Kyme" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 20:43:45 +0100

> 
> There is currently no limit on the number of identities an internet 
> user can have.  How are you going to change that?
> -- 

(Ah, yes, I had missed your point. Which I now take.)

You'll need to answer a question for me:
What is an "identity"?

--
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---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 17:03:04 -0400

>You'll need to answer a question for me:

Not to cop out or anything--but I really don't have a good answer. 
The balance between privacy, authentication and responsibility are 
all part of it, and it's not an easy one to strike.

You'd posited that a "sender" gets one shot.  So really (as in any 
whitelisting system), you have to make a decision as to what "sender" 
means.  I'm not fond of whitelisting myself, we support it, but we 
consider it a patch to deal with a failure in the system.  The 
inability to nail down "identity" is the primary reason I don't like 
it.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.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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From: Jim Youll <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 18:02:14 -0400

At 17:03 -0400 4/23/03, Kee Hinckley wrote:
>  I'm not fond of whitelisting myself, we support it, but we consider 
>it a patch to deal with a failure in the system.  The inability to 
>nail down "identity" is the primary reason I don't like it.

I can see how a whitelist can be useful in a world where other, more 
precise measures, do not provide perfect protection... like the world 
we are in right now. Primarily, a whitelist built on rather simple 
heuristics could assure delivery of things that should be delivered. 
Cooperation between clients and servers is needed to pull it off 
properly, but that seems workable.

Rule: Allow all whitelisted senders to pass through without 
additional checks, then treat skeptically whatever is left via 
traditional processing.

it bootstraps easily:
A writes to B					B should be added to 
A's whitelist
B does not reject[1] the message from A		A should be added to 
B's whitelist

The likelihood of spammers capturing a large percentage of all (A,B) 
interactions and then generating forged messages to likely (A,B) 
pairs is very low, since these are private interactions not seen by 
others.

The list might carry a status column for "auto-added" or "blocked and 
don't re-add" when unwanted senders with persistent identities are 
noted.

I am interested in mail client--mail server collaborative solutions. 
If anyone else is similarly interested, please contact me off-list.

====

[1] "reject" -- somehow tell the system you don't want this by filing 
in special "spam" folder or clicking "Spam" button on mail client UI 
or forwarding to special processing address at the mail host

---

From: "Jon Kyme" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:04:57 +0100

> inability to nail down "identity" is the primary reason I don't like 

I appreciate your point that a system implementing this sort of approach
probably has to track *identifiers*. The cheapness of identifiers (email
addresses, whatever) is a feature (strength / weakness - depends on your
p.o.v.) of the current system.

I'm not sure that this is a fatal objection to all and any permission-based
proposals, in-band or (as MKD suggests) OOB. I've got a bad feeling that it
leads me back down the "Certs required to send mail" track.

Ho hum.

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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 10:15:48 -0400

At 6:02 PM -0400 4/23/03, Jim Youll wrote:
>B does not reject[1] the message from A		A should be 
>added to B's whitelist
>

Low, but not non-existent.  We've already seen spammers using "close" 
email addresses in the from.  It's not clear if these were from 
mailing list or web-page grabs, or just using addresses in the same 
corporate domain.  We've also seen trojan's that grab your address 
book and spam everyone in it.  One assumes they could (if they 
haven't already) use that address book for whitelisting spam.

I agree.  It's useful.  And it works now.  But if we drive spammers 
into a corner where the only out is using whitelisted addresses I 
belive they will still be able to survive.  On the other hand. 
Driving spammers into forging real addresses makes gives you a wider 
array of legal attack options.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 10:17:44 -0400

>proposals, in-band or (as MKD suggests) OOB. I've got a bad feeling that it

The lack of persistent identifiers for end-users is not currently a 
major problem for whitelisting systems.  It does however, make 
blacklisting systems fairly useless.  We discourage our users from 
blacklisting spam senders.  Our experience is that they will never 
see that email address again, and having it in the block list just 
slows down the processing.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: Jim Youll <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 15:22:17 -0400

At 10:15 -0400 4/26/03, Kee Hinckley wrote:
>>The likelihood of spammers capturing a large percentage of all 
>>(A,B) interactions and then generating forged messages to likely 
>>(A,B) pairs is very low, since these are private interactions not 
>>seen by others.
>
>Low, but not non-existent.  We've already seen spammers using 
>"close" email addresses in the from.  It's not clear if these were 
>from mailing list or web-page grabs, or just using addresses in the 
>same corporate domain.  We've also seen trojan's that grab your 
>address book and spam everyone in it.  One assumes they could (if 
>they haven't already) use that address book for whitelisting spam.
>

Yes, but that's it exactly.

1. Whether you are talking about a civil or criminal proceeding, 
depending on where the law goes and when, a court in general does not 
like a party with "dirty hands" so this particular corner is useful 
in that there have been and will continue to be successful 
prosecutions of those who adopt the identity of others without 
permission.

2. A massive increase in from: forgery would render e-mail generally 
useless to all, and so I suggest, would rather quickly gain the 
attention and sympathies of everyone up and down the food chain, from 
law making, to law enforcement, to ISP and end-user. There are a very 
few whose actions could ruin things for all, and I don't see how that 
could be tolerated for long.

I still must say that neither you nor anyone else has much ability to 
know with whom I correspond outside of the few I may respond to in 
public forums.

Remembering that its purpose is only to assure that _clearly_ 
should-deliver mail is not caught up in an accidental trap, a 
whitelist can even be a little more picky than matching to: and 
from:, for example, including the expected SMTP source or originating 
ISP. The worst-case events in the case of a whitelist miss are (a) 
that something should notice that the whitelist may need to be 
retrained; (b) the message is subject to the usual legitimacy tests 
before it's delivered.