Spam Control Considered Harmful

Thu Oct 30 23:02:41 UTC 1997

At 12:55 PM 10/29/97 -0800, Scott Hazen Mueller wrote:
>>From: Phil Lawlor <phil at agis.net>
>
>Welcome to the discussion, Phil.
>
>>>a large-scale re-structuring of Internet mail to provide for secure
>>>authentication and cost sharing for received e-mail.
>
>>What if the equivalent of "caller ID" was built into sendmail?  Making sure
>>that the sender is a valid email address.
>
>It's a necessary precondition, but not sufficient by itself.  Also, simple
>address verification may or may not be enough.  There is no statute or case
>law that makes the owner of an address legally liable for the mail emitting
>from there - this could be an issue for claims of forgery and the like.
>
>The above notwithstanding, assume for the sake of argument that one could
>develop and deploy a secure mail system that authenticated message origin to
>the account level.  This would meet the first requirement, and could
>*possibly* be the infrastructure for building the second.  However, limiting
>anonymity likely wouldn't provide a strong deterrent by itself, since
spammers
>could still run through multiple non-anonymous dialup accounts over the
>lifetime of a spam campaign.

Slow down there folks.  Disallowing anonymity on the net is another
/serious/ issue.  If you need reasons why...

1) Incest and Rape support groups.

2) Political speech

Just keep on adding your reasons below, but please don't forward them to
the list.

**************************************************************
Justin W. Newton                        voice: +1-650-482-2840 	
Senior Network Architect                  fax: +1-650-482-2844
PRIORI NETWORKS, INC.                    http://www.priori.net
Legislative and Policy Director, ISP/C   http://www.ispc.org
"The People You Know.  The People You Trust."
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