From: Steven F Siirila <sfs@tc.umn.edu>
To: Mark McCarron <markmccarron_itt@hotmail.com>
CC: asrg@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [Asrg] 'GIEIS' - The Fifth Response
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 14:31:19 -0500
On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 07:05:56PM +0000, Mark McCarron wrote:
>
> >> (1) In the short to medium term
> >>
> >> Devise a method of reasonably reliably identifying bulk spam,
> >> UCE or UBE and levying a charge on the senders (via any of their
> >> upstream carriers, financial pain having the properties that it
> >> does) which approaches that of any other method of commercial
> >> or non-private bulk message delivery and most of the TECHNICAL
> >> NETWORKING problems associated with spam - which are almost
> >> entirely due intractable volumes of traffic - would rapidly
> >> disappear.
> >>
> >> Mark's Response:
> >>
> >> The problem with this suggestion is that spammers are difficult to
> >> trace and even when traced there lacks the proper legal frameworks
> >> to do much about it.
> >
> >
> >Spammers are only difficult to trace because there has been, until
> >recently, little incentive to trace them and no sanctions placed
> >on any injection points (which certainly can do most of the
> >necessary tracing if well configured) for failure to do so.
>
>
> Mark's Response:
>
> No. The Internet crosses many legal boundries across the planet. With
> anonymous connections such as those by proxy (SOCKS, HTTP, etc) and those
> by extensive proxy chains, simply back-tracing a tranmission is a legal
> nightmare. Imagine attempting to get server logs from 40 or 50 different
> countries and then not even being guarenteed that the culprit is still
> there at the end of it all. 'GIEIS' would eliminate the need for all of
> this.
So would simply requiring reverse DNS as well as a record indicating whether
or not an IP address has been designated as an MTA. This would make all of
the open proxies, hacked desktops, and dynamic IP ranges unable to send mail
directly to a site's MX server, forcing them to use an ISP's SMTP gateway.
What you would have left is legitimate MTAs (some of which may be open relays).
This is essentially where we are headed at our site by putting these sorts of
things into place gradually.
--
_________________________________________________________________Steven F. Siirila Office: Lind Hall, Room 130B Internet Services E-mail: sfs@umn.edu Office of Information Technology Voice: (612) 626-0244 University of Minnesota