Economics of SPAM [Was: Micorsoft's Sender IDAuthentication......?]

Mon Jun 13 09:32:31 UTC 2005

> Here's a simple mechanism which has not yet been tried
> seriously. Email server peering. This means that an SMTP
> server operator only accepts incoming mail from operators 
> with whom they have a bilateral email peering agreement.

This has been tried in the X.400 world. I wouldn't exactly say it
worked well - and I, for one, have no desire to return to X.400
style email peering.

> Bilateral agreements have been shown to scale quite well
> whether you look at BGP peering or the world of business
> contracts. In any case, the fundamental need here is that
> for somebody to notify the email administrator that is
> sending spam and for that administrator to act immediately
> to cut the flow.

The number of agreements needed in the email world is significantly
higher than what is needed for BGP.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no