Slashdot Mirror
When Spammers Try To Sue You
An Anonymous Coward writes: "I was looking for information about what recourse there is against spammers when I came across this site. It appears that Bernard Shifman sent email to several people trying to solcit employment via spam, and when they replied to him, asking him to stop, and reporting the spam to his ISP he threatend them with a lawsuit. It's a very entertaining read."
Forget the law, I think we can eliminate most SPAM very simply with as small change to current technology I've outlined before:
"I can't figure out who to open a discussion with about this, but I have this simple idea that should at least eliminate the anonymous/spoofed spam, which is all I get.
You simply modify the mail servers to query the sending server whether a received mail actually came from that server. The query is a key based on the contents of the message and a key included with the message, which is itself based on the same contents and a private key of the sending server. If the sending server has been upgraded with this feature, it can validate, or not, the message. If it's not validated, the message is bounced. For backwards compatibility, if the sending server hasn't been upgraded, the message always goes through. [Here's the beauty of the idea:] But as more servers are upgraded, fewer and fewer servers will be able to be used as scapegoats for spoofed spam, and pressure will mount to upgrade these servers as well.
Eventually, the only spam you will get will be from a valid return address, which can be handled more effectively in more conventional ways. In fact, adding manual bouncing at this stage might be helpful as well, since now it really will bounce back to the sender.
I realize I've glossed over some details here, and someone much more experienced in mail servers will have to massage this approach to make it practical, but I think the germ of a very simple but effective idea is here."
Xesdeeni