Re: [Asrg] Anti-spam laws do work, FYI. There's proof.

[Bill Cole <grsa at billmail.scconsult.com>]

At 5:00 AM -0700 7/28/04, Roger B.A. Klorese wrote:
> The war on spam can only be acceptable if it is about eliminating 
> all of the spam you can eliminate without interfering with the 
> delivery of a single piece of legitimate mail.

We're well past that point already, well into the territory of 
redefining 'legitimate mail,' particularly in terms of how mail gets 
handled, so that anti-spam measures don't interfere. You may not like 
that, but it is how things have changed in the real world over the 
past decade.

> Sender authentication is ill-considered on the 
> getting-real-mail-through side, because the proponents have 
> dismissed legitimate concerns (no collateral damage, 
> inappropriateness or impossibility of controlling connectivity 
> requirements, incompatibility with prevailing forwarding technology) 
> as fodder in their crusade.

It really depends on which scheme you are referring to. At this 
point, the breeding and adaptation to edge cases and over-engineering 
of the various basic ideas has lead to a situation where the variant 
proposals do not all have all those issues. The original SPF/RMX/DRIP 
proposals broke forwarders, the mess that MS has proposed and Yahoo's 
Domain Keys do not. SPF has a workaround for forwarders. No matter 
what is done to reduce spam, some mail that would be deemed 
legitimate by current practice will not continue to work reliably or 
possibly at all. Spam is not a technical problem, it is a social 
problem, and any technical approach to reducing it will inevitably 
require changes in non-spam email because the best that can be done 
technically is to address issues that correlate imperfectly to 
whether mail is spam.
--
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com


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