Spam Control Considered Harmful

Derek Andree derek at firstcomm.com
Thu Oct 30 00:00:07 UTC 1997


Phil Lawlor wrote:

> At 12:56 PM 10/29/97 -0600, Cal Thixton - President - ThoughtPort Authority
> of Chicago wrote:
> >The problem with the 'Caller-ID' idea is verifying that an email address
> is >'valid' (assuming you have a reasonable definition for 'valid').  About
> the only >thing that sendmail can do is verify a reverse lookup is equal to
> its forward >lookup.
>
> Exactly.  I guess the question is, should we build more sender verification
> into sendmail, on both the sending and receiving side?
>
> Phil Lawlor
> President
> AGIS
> Voice - 313-730-1130
> Fax   - 313-563-6119

  It would seem like a nice feature for Sendmail, but do you think it is
realistic to assume that everyone would upgrade?  I know of many hosts which
use "outdated" versions of Sendmail.  Then you would be faced with the
question of whether to only allow connections from the latest version of
sendmail (with the sender verification), which would limit it's usefulness.

Derek Andree
derek at firstcomm.com




More information about the NANOG mailing list