How do you stop outgoing spam?

Tue Sep 10 17:18:59 UTC 2002

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:

> > It is more trouble than its worth. SPAM is not a technical problem. It is a
> > social problem. Using technical methods is not going to solve the problem.

> There are two saying that come to mind:

> "You can't solve social problems with technical solutions"

That's what happens when you hang around with software engineers too long.
They think all problems are solvable. And most problems, especially social
ones, aren't: they need to be managed. Sure, you can't stop spam entirely
by technical (or other) means, but that's no reason to ignore the problem
and run an open relay.

> "There are very few inter-personal problems that can't be solved by the
> suitable application of high explosives"

Sounds like a technical solution to me...

> Spam is likely going to be a problem until we either hire some thug muscle from
> <pick ethnic organized crime group>, or the government does it for us...

Or we throw out SMTP and adopt a mail protocol that requires the sender to
provide some credentials that can't be faked. Then known spammers are easy
to blacklist.