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> It seems to me that if we had a means by which a sending MTA could
> request such profile from the receiving MTA before sending it has the
> potential to drastically cut down spam.
This is an idea which has been discussed before on the list. Some
people objected on the grounds that a spammer using a compromised
MTA might scan people's personal consent policy to see how to
produce messages which will slip through the recipient's filters.
Other people might prefer the idea of partial disclosure: only
allowing certain MTAs to query the policy, or only allowing a subset
of the policy to be disclosed.
It's potentially a useful feature for reducing traffic but it may
be open to abuse by spammers, so it's a little controversial.
From the consent framework, section 2.1:> I'd like to see several layers to this, though they are all pretty much
> the same in operation but differentiated by scope.
>
> I'd like MUA's to be able to forward their policy to the incoming
> POP/IMAP server, this would then be available to be queried by delibery
> agents, and hence get into the SMTP network.
I must admit, I do like the idea of sending my policy to my ISP's
incoming mail server. At the very least this would allow them to
block spam on my behalf, saving me the need to download useless
messages which I'll only have to delete or locally filter anyway.