RE: [Asrg] Removing the incentive to spam

["Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker@verisign.com>]

> There's no law that says that "content-filters" can't recognize
> identical pictures.  Spam pictures are likely to vary less than spam
> URLs pointing to pictures.  That's not to say that spam pictures won't
> vary, but that the easiest variations in URLs such as %-encoding and
> user:password@ are lost if you send the picture instead of a pointer
> to the picture.

There are a lot of programs already in use that create custom images.
So basically the cost of sending each message goes up by one GIF
compression.

There are ways of detecting images that have been slightly modified 
but they are very CPU intensive.

> Such changes will cause fewer total graphics in all mail, if you count
> URLs pointing to pictures as "graphics," as I think you must.  Some
> people who now include completely unneeded pictures, logos, icons,
> and so forth will think twice when their mail bloats by 50 or 500
> KBytes.  Note that I wrote "some people" instead of "everyone." Many
> people won't notice or understand, at least not a first. 

To first order the only people who will notice are people who are on 
dialup. The majority of Internet users would not know a megabyte if
it hit them in the middle of the street.

> If at first
> there are significantly more graphics, outfits like MSN and Hotmail
> will have bloating disk space reasons figure out how to let their
> users know.  For example, they might make the "Size" indications in
> folders harder to ignore, or they might expire big messages sooner.

More likely they will only accept large images from sources that 
authenticate themselves in some fashion.

The killer app for Hotmail is sending pictures of cousin Neville to
aunt Mabel, neither of whom know anything about computers.


	Phill
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