How do you stop outgoing spam?

Tue Sep 10 20:33:13 UTC 2002

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> 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.

The "credentials that can't be faked" is a rather hard to implement 
concept.  Simply because there's no way to impose a single authority on 
the entire world.  The question is whom to trust to certify the sender's
authenticity?  I have correspondents in parts of the world where I'd be 
very reluctant to trust "proper" authorities.  I'd be so very easy to 
silence anyone by _not_ issuing credentials.

Besides, anonymous communication has its merits.  So what's needed is 
zero-knowledge authentication and Web-of-trust model.  And don't forget 
key revocation and detection of fake identity factories.  Messy, messy, 
messy.

--vadim