Subject: Re: [Asrg] Permission-based antispam-antivirus solutions

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 22:07:29 -0400

At 06:50 PM 6/19/2003 -0500, [email-masked] wrote:
>[..]
>Do you know anything else that would be so effective, so cheap, so easily and
>quickly implemented, and with as little disruption to ALL established 
>legitimate
>users of the Net?

This proposal does not seem to be able to be "easily and quickly 
implemented, and with as little disruption to ALL established legitimate 
users of the Net?":
1. As Vernon pointed out, most MUAs are sending out HTML formated mail by 
default right now. Even if you turn off those settings, it will take a lot 
of time for those changes to propogate through the Net. Now assuming that 
at least 80% of end users run Windows, and the default client, Outlook 
Express, is used by most of them (or Outlook/Exchange in corporate 
environment), that's a lot of end users. If you will start implementing 
these changes, most regular end users will be affected. How many users of 
the Internet are these end users?
2. How does blocking attachments help solve the spam problem? The only 
benefit I see so far is anti-virus, and that is not an issue for ASRG.
3. This proposal is based on an assumption that most spam is HTML based. 
However, I personally get a lot of spam not HTML based and just plain text. 
How long will it take until all spam becomes simple text?

HTML, base64, etc. blocking is already partially being implemented by some 
filters, SpamAssasin, especially. This proposal is more of a suggestion 
list for filtering than a full fledged proposal.

Yakov  

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