Unbelievable Spam.

Tue Feb 3 16:47:40 UTC 2004

Hi,

...on Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 10:31:00AM +0000, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

 > When will we realize that SPAM is a social problem and it 
 > needs a social solution?

I agree insofar as a solution is needed that helps making
the criminals accountable. But then, the low barriers 
are probably the major reason for the success of the 
mail system - I assume the likes of AOL and Compuserve 
and MSN would have wanted something else before they 
became some kind of value-added internet dialup providers 
(or disappeared).

 > When will the major email providers
 > sit down around a table and agree to some guidelines for
 > email exchange that make it impossible for rogue users to
 > inject large volumes of email into the system?

Aren't you suggesting a technical solution here? 
A social solution wouldn't need to make it impossible to 
inject rogue mail into the system, it would just need 
to make the sender identifiable. As soon as that's 
happened, the infrastructure to take care of the 
offender is already in place in the real world.
(Although I'm not shure which of both is the harder 
problem.)

 > The existing
 > non-hierarchical email exchange network is not scalable.

Oh, given the amounts of spam and virii we transport 
today, I think it scaled well beyond anyone's expectation, 
and I don't see the big internet email meltdown coming 
on any kind of technical layer soon. End-Users will 
become fed up in the system much earlier.

Alex.

-- 
AB54-RIPE