Subject: [Asrg] Two ways to look at spam

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 01:37:38 -0400

It seems to me that the members of the group are looking at the spam 
problem from two different angles:

1. Network Abuse - some people including Barry Shain and Eric Brunner 
specifically, have been proposing that we look at the entire spam problem 
as one of network abuse. The Internet in general, and SMTP in particular, 
have been built as open systems trusting all network users to behave 
themselves. Spam is caused by those users abusing the network and its 
resources.
2. Consent - others in particular, the people or person who wrote the group 
charter, propose that spam be viewed as an issue of consent. Spam is caused 
by the fact that the receivers have no mechanisms in place to be able to 
express their consent to receiving email.

Thus, all of the proposals fall into three general categories:
1. Network Abuse - these proposals are the ones that look at the underlying 
nature of email and trying to fix or correct the abuse problem. This 
includes RMX, rDNS, certificates in DNS, distributed spam detection systems 
such as DCC, systems for detecting open relays and proxies, creating a 
separate email system, moving from SMTP to a different protocol, charging 
for sending email, etc.
2. Consent - these proposals do not try to block the email at the sender's 
end, or as at being transferred over the network. Instead, they concentrate 
solely at the receiver's point. These proposals define various mechanisms 
and structures through which the receiver (or his ISP), can his or her 
consent about wanting to receive email. These include trusted sender 
systems (like Habeas), filtering systems based on message content (like 
SpamAssasin, HTML blocking), C/R systems, systems based on passwords 
(Selby's proposal for lock-and-key), manual whitelists, etc.
3. Combination - these includes combination systems like filtering on 
receiver's end based on a blacklist of open proxies, etc.

The problem is that many of these approaches if implemented independently 
of each other, would not be able to operate together as a cohesive system, 
and in some cases interfere with each other. I would like to see these two 
models of spam and three approaches to anti-spam defined clearly so we can 
work out a cohesive model of how to fight spam.

Yakov

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