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Re: [Asrg] [IP] 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam



At 23/6/2004 16:03 Wednesday, you wrote:
For example, I might grant my Aunt Gertrude the right to use fonts and
bold/underline in her E-mails to me, or JPGs of her poodle Fifi, but I wouldn't
grant her the right to send me Javascript, ActiveX, or executable attachments.
E-mails that LOOK like the sort of things I'd expect to get from Gerty would be
delivered to me; even if her machine got turned into a zombie spambot. Stuff
that DOESN'T look like what I expect to receive from Gerty would be summarily
t-canned, even if it (actually and truly) came from her machine and with her
return address. (In practice, most people wouldn't allow ANYBODY AT ALL to send
them executables, PIF files, SCR files, CPL files, VBS files, and the like...
even ZIP files... which would essentially eliminate the ability of infecting
those user machines with zombie spambots! You don't require daily updates of
virus/worm signatures (which, of course, also inevitably LAG the problem) for
that!)

Sure, and what you think would be the first thing that all the (l)users out there do? Right, grant every right to everybody, because they dont want to burden themselves with deciding who can do what.
"You" are talking about users that know what they do. But these users dont have problems now either. So why bother?
"People" WANT to receive ANYTHING from their friends, familiy, potential friends, etc. just because it might be something important.


As long as the user CAN send and receive this type of content by mail, they will do so and it will be abused. Remove the features from all mail clients to solve this problem. Declare MIME dead. Plain text is the only valid mail format.
Then you might have a chance to solve these problems.


Andreas


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