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

[Lane Sharman <lane at opendoors.com>]

Friends,

I do not comment too often but I think we need to think about the 
problem differently with the following realities in mind.

a) eMail has improved greatly the lives and productivity of individuals 
by communicating in rich images, attachments and html.
b) a diversity of interests have transformed eMail into an integral part 
of global commerce.
c) Like any system of transportation, with common law rules, there will 
be highway robbers, and,
d) A good system of protection, albeit imperfect, will protect the many 
from the few, most of the time pretty well.

I see SMTP traffic as a flow which, like water, must go thru a 
filtration system. I do not see SMTP water as ever being restored to the 
condition it was ante 1985 or so. Let's move on.

Therefore, with SMTP, as with a good old house, let's provide it with 
some additional out-of-protocol support. The best I have done as a 
company is to license a filtration power plant (postini) to those who 
have heard my analysis.

Perhaps, we could agree that 10-20 filtration plants around the world, 
as mandatory points of relay, would be a beginning solution point, not 
an end but a good beginning.

Lane

Andreas Saurwein wrote:

> 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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--
Lane Sharman
Enterprise and Personal Email Content Filtering and Hosting
http://www.opendoors.com
858-755-2868




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