Micorsoft's Sender ID Authentication......?

Fri Jun 10 00:42:50 UTC 2005

On 06/09/05, Stephen Sprunk <stephen at sprunk.org> wrote: 

> If my grandmother has a "reputation" for sending legitimate email, and she
> inadvertently installs some spam zombie software, it is certainly feasible
> (and probably trivial) for the spammer to steal all her credentials and thus
> her "reputation".  Spam will get out for a while, but once her "reputation"
> significantly degrades, it will be stopped -- as will any future legitimate
> email from her.

	Anyone who has been paying much attention to the spam problem in
	the past few years already knows that assigning a bad reputation
	forever is a bad idea -- especially to dialups.

	What's more likely to happen in your Grandmother's case is that
	her IP/e-mail address will have a bad reputation for a while,
	and then she'll call you and you'll come over and un-zombify her
	cmoputer and say "okay, Grandma, remember what we said about
	clicking on links on porn sites?" and she'll say "oh, but it was
	blinking such pretty colors!" and a few hours/days later the
	reputation will have returned to the default state.

-- 
J.D. Falk                                              blong! you are a pickle!
<jdfalk at cybernothing.org>