Slashdot Mirror
Revising the Internet Email Infrastructure
Lauren Weinstein writes "People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR) today released a white paper aimed at starting discussion and work to fundamentally revamp Internet e-mail systems to control spam, forgeries, and a range of other problems, while empowering e-mail users rather than ISPs." Excellent start.
Until this comes out, PGP is a great way to keep your email private and secure. It also deals with forged headers using email signing. MIT has a great client here
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
They may well come up with some "standard" for a new internet email system but, nobody is going to use it. Hell ESMTP has been out for years and it still isn't supported by more than half the systems that are on the net.
This TRIPOLI PIT system they are talking about seems to be the same as putting a rule in your email server saying "don't accept anything that isn't PGP signed".
So, how long has IPV6 been out? How much of the net is converted?
that Public Key Encryption was the answer to email woes. PK just needs to be adopted across the board.
I thought about writing more, but I really don't see the need to.
PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility
TRIPOLI Project Press Release
May 8, 2003
PFIR Home Page
PFIR Announces the "TRIPOLI" Project
A Call to Arms to the Internet and Open-Source Communities!
It's Time to Secure E-Mail, Control Spam, and Empower E-Mail Users!
People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR) co-founders Lauren Weinstein and Peter G. Neumann today called on the Internet and Open-Source Communities to consider a proposal for the most significant and far-reaching changes to e-mail systems since the creation of the Internet and its ancestor ARPANET more than 30 years ago.
PFIR today released a white paper describing a proposed project to consider the implementation and deployment of widespread encryption, authentication, anti-spam, and other advances directly into the fundamental structure of Internet, intranet, and local e-mail systems.
The "TRIPOLI" project overview paper located at:
http://www.pfir.org/tripoli-overview
describes the proposed new environment which focuses on ensuring that choices and power regarding e-mail are vested directly with e-mail users themselves, rather than with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or government agencies.
The changes described by the TRIPOLI proposal could be gradually implemented, largely based upon open-source software tools that already exist. Ultimately under TRIPOLI, the volumes of forgeries and spam (both received by users and traversing the Internet) would be drastically reduced, by default all e-mail would be encrypted, and e-mail users would have essentially complete control over how they individually choose to send and receive e-mail.
"Current e-mail systems were not designed to deal with the kind of world we have today -- they've become a hopeless nightmare for users and ISPs alike," said Weinstein. "E-mail users are inundated with spam, forged mail, and other garbage, and unfortunately the actions many ISPs are taking to try control spam and other e-mail are shackling their honest customers with unreasonable restrictions and making matters even worse. Some of the proposed anti-spam laws may also exacerbate these problems without really controlling spam at all. Legitimate e-mail users need to be put back in the driver's seat, and there isn't a moment to lose."
"These problems are getting more severe every day," said Neumann. "Not only are users and networks drowning under spam and other e-mail deficiencies, but basic matters of security and reliability on the Internet are being largely ignored under the current intolerable situation. These critical problems simply cannot be fixed without coordinated and major changes to the way e-mail is handled throughout the Internet. It's going to be a big job, but we have to get going on this right now."
PFIR hopes that the TRIPOLI proposal can act as a starting point for discussion and implementation of systems to solve the many e-mail problems that exist today, in a manner that empowers users rather than unfairly restricting them. PFIR invites the participation of the open-source and Internet communities at large towards these crucial goals.
Persons interested in participating or getting more information about the TRIPOLI project can send e-mail to:
tripoli-info@pfir.org
or use the contacts listed below.
- - -
CONTACTS:
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@pfir.org
Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Peter G. Neumann
neuma
SMTP is here to stay and it won't change within any reasonable time period. It's unfortunate that it's so unsecure, but that's just the way it is.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first so that they won't be able to run away while you slowly torture them to death.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Have they passed their recommendations by Al Gore yet?
Trolling is a art,
In case of slashdotting, the text of the article reads:
People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR) co-founders Lauren Weinstein and Peter G. Neumann today called on the Internet and Open-Source Communities to consider a proposal for the most significant and far-reaching changes to e-mail systems since the creation of the Internet and its ancestor ARPANET more than 30 years ago.
PFIR today released a white paper describing a proposed project to consider the implementation and deployment of widespread encryption, authentication, anti-spam, and other advances directly into the fundamental structure of Internet, intranet, and local e-mail systems.
The "TRIPOLI" project overview paper located at:
http://www.pfir.org/tripoli-overview
describes the proposed new environment which focuses on ensuring that choices and power regarding e-mail are vested directly with e-mail users themselves, rather than with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or government agencies.
The changes described by the TRIPOLI proposal could be gradually implemented, largely based upon open-source software tools that already exist. Ultimately under TRIPOLI, the volumes of forgeries and spam (both received by users and traversing the Internet) would be drastically reduced, by default all e-mail would be encrypted, and e-mail users would have essentially complete control over how they individually choose to send and receive e-mail.
"Current e-mail systems were not designed to deal with the kind of world we have today -- they've become a hopeless nightmare for users and ISPs alike," said Weinstein. "E-mail users are inundated with spam, forged mail, and other garbage, and unfortunately the actions many ISPs are taking to try control spam and other e-mail are shackling their honest customers with unreasonable restrictions and making matters even worse. Some of the proposed anti-spam laws may also exacerbate these problems without really controlling spam at all. Legitimate e-mail users need to be put back in the driver's seat, and there isn't a moment to lose."
"These problems are getting more severe every day," said Neumann. "Not only are users and networks drowning under spam and other e-mail deficiencies, but basic matters of security and reliability on the Internet are being largely ignored under the current intolerable situation. These critical problems simply cannot be fixed without coordinated and major changes to the way e-mail is handled throughout the Internet. It's going to be a big job, but we have to get going on this right now."
PFIR hopes that the TRIPOLI proposal can act as a starting point for discussion and implementation of systems to solve the many e-mail problems that exist today, in a manner that empowers users rather than unfairly restricting them. PFIR invites the participation of the open-source and Internet communities at large towards these crucial goals.
Persons interested in participating or getting more information about the TRIPOLI project can send e-mail to:
tripoli-info@pfir.org
I don't think they are discussing the mailbox protocols here.
I think it's the transports (MTA I believe, think MX records)
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Will the Big ISPs buy in?? Otherwise it will never be particularly usable esp since AOL is two of the largest ISPs in the country. I think that we will be more likely to be using whatever the AOL Earthlink consortium come up with.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I know very little about this so correct me if I am wrong. The only way to really let each user have complete control over email, would be for each user to have there own mail server and/or domain. This is why most people let their ISP's handle their mail. And you would still get crap from bulk mailers, spammers.
What is to keep spammers from setting up a "tripoli" authenticated MTA?
No, it won't work.
SMTP is here to stay. We're going to have to live with it. Spam control filtering is getting better and there is a good chance that together with decent legislation, spam can be reigned in. A new system will ultimately just create new kinds of abuse, which wil lrequire the industry to take another two year cycle to address.
Sure, ISPs can block PITS from unsavory PCAs, but what stops spammers from creating new, bogus PCAs as needed? If there are only a few "recognized" PCAs, doesn't this tend to concentrate power into a relatively small set of entities?
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
A revamping of the email technology is what needs to take place. Not an internet tax (good crap we are taxed enough already). Along those lines (better technology instead of more bureaucracy) two great technologies that already exist, that help in the email realm, are GnuPG and Bogofilter.
Hmm... This needs a -1 (Dumbass) moderation.
/., but jesus that was a thoughtless post.
Think before you post. I know this is
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
First thing is to rename it "i-mail".
Best Windows Freeware
I'm sick of reading proposals (often from industry profit-seeking types) who want to put a paid-for "stamp" or similar "token" on email. (I'm talking generally, though---yes---I did read this paper)
It looks attractive logic:
1. Lots of people use email
2. We offer a system which will beat spam at a cost---our 'trusted 3rd party' or whatever---but only if people who use it can't talk to anyone else, so everyone has to use it
3. Profit.
This is NOT the way forward on spam. Nor, realistically, is anything which re-writes the rules for email. People like editing headers. In fact, if it weren't for spam, people like email as it is---period.
The way forward seems simple:
smtp servers should start requiring genuine users to log in. (though rarely used, there are smtp systems which allow this, and most major clients---yes even the MS ones---already talk to these servers and have done for years)
servers which don't should quickly find their way onto blacklists.
(I shall leave the exact way these blacklists should be used as an exercise for the reader)
Simple. Low cost. Not a business model; but a clear solution.
Anyone want to start writing to ISPs?
Problems like the current state of e-mail always
inspire me to consider the need to do things
right the first time. There are many good systems
that grow organically and work well but at some
point it is realized that there are major holes.
At that point the installed base is too big...
...it lives and dies by the efficacy of the CAs. If the CAs suck, then the credentials they send with email mean nothing.
I like the idea, but I wonder which sort of orgs are going to be their "PCAs"? ISPs pretty much allow any comer onto their network, so giving all users a cert wouldn't stop people from making temporary accounts for spam.
Perhaps the ease with which MTAs could cut off CAs (like cutting off domains) would help give incentive to ISPs (or whoever is the PCA) to crack down on their customer base, but that strategy is only marginally successful today. Why would creds make this strategy any better?
Perhaps MTAs would be harder to config as open relays, because authn is required. But what percent of spam comes through open relays? If it's a big percentage, then this may help.
Has anyone analyzed this scenario? I'd like to hear some informed thoughts on what sort of email regime we could expect if this were implemented.
I disagree, migrating from SMTP would not be THAT difficult. Give it a 3 year phase in or whatever, and people WILL change.
Would you change your e-mail system if it eliminated SPAM? Thats what I thought.
Now... Its just too bad that this is being done by People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR). Can't a real organization tackle this? Wouldn't something like this have a much better chance for success if a standards board were doing the white paper? Who is going to implement a suggestion by PFIR. Really.
Oh well...
i read the paper, but i don't see what is so new with this. the suggestions it makes seem to be similar to methods for email encryption and spam filtering that are already in place.
joe emailer hasn't taken the time to figure these existing methods out, that's why it seems as though they're not working. i don't know what tripoli is going to offer that will get joe off his butt and get him signed up with a "Pit Certificate Authority".
aoeu
The only thing that can stop unsolicited spam are laws and prosecution. No matter how complicated the system may be, it will never completely eliminate spam. Go after spammers with the same verocity as the RIAA would with file swapping. Get some anti-spam laws with some teeth.
Those who would trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither.
The current "hysteria" over spam is going to lead the Joe Sixpacks and the Mothers-protecting-their-children crowd to accept, indeed to beg for, restrictions on their liberties, all in the name of "stopping those spammers". For the rest of us, for whom "WWW" is NOT synonymous with "The Internet", this could have dire consequences. What if I run my own server, and I'm not "blessed" by the current Official AntiSpam Policy Du Jour ? Do I lose out?
Spammers suck, use your filters. DON'T give the government (and media giants, and Big ISPs) the authority to rewrite the way that the Internet works.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
As bad as the spam problem is, it's unlikely that you can get sufficient momentum in the community to displace one of the primal IP application protocols anytime soon. The solution, for better or worse, is probably going to be a combination of filtering technology, $$ legal judgements $$, and Ghu help us, legislation.
(Though anyone taking up a collection to hire the Narn Bat Squad for re-educating spammers please let me know...)
It would seem so. Like any certification mechanism, you've got to trust the certifiers. And in practice, that means a few big ones.
I found the point especially odd considering the polemic in the beginning about how individuals need to have their own MTAs that can negotiate around port restrictions lest the evil ISPs control them.
A verbose article, which didn't seem very consistent. The kernel idea (don't allow forged headers) has been brought up a number of times. Not much value added here.
Increase your e-mail infrastructure size by inches!
With our new herbal nutrient, you will have a larger, safe, naturaly enhanced e-mail infrastructure in days!!
Get paid to code OSS
Instead of proposing yet another certificate authority scheme (which is PITA to use), why not just charge for email.
A nickel an email will surely slow down spam. Maybe the money could go to some Internet Infrastructure fund or something.
If people would only use this RFC: http://www.faqs.org/ftp/rfc/rfc2549.txt (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service, a modification of http://www.faqs.org/ftp/rfc/rfc1149.txt), there would be no spam, as the normal can of spam is MUCH too heavy for a carrier pigeon to carry.
Maybe an African Swallow, however...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
well. free software might have no fbi backdoor ?
Enough with the Franklin quotes. It's not relevant to the issue here, so I can only conclude you are kharma whoring.
The problem with nearly every single encryption technology, or initiative for securing and improving Internet communication, is that it tries to solve too many problems at once. History has proven over and over again that it's the small, easy steps that move progress forward, not giant ones.
PGP, HTTPS, S/MIME and countless other 'standards' have all made the same mistake in trying to force users to adopt multiple new rules. What's wrong with just providing encryption, without any of the additional burdens of establishing identity? Countless transfers are sent unencrypted every day because the cost of a web server certificate - which is only expensive because it establishes identity - is so high. Anyone can make a server that provides encryption, but such a server is useless with today's browsers. And yet, I'm supposed to have faith that the people Microsoft, AOL and Opera choose to trust are the people that I want to trust?
It is obvious where email will change next, no matter how much money and time is spent on projects like this one. More and more people will use 'virtual receptionist' services that require you to return an auto-reply message to prove that you're real. Eventually, email clients will develop a way to autodetect and autoreply to these messages, until some sort of system is hammered out. You'll write your message, it will be delivered, the receiving server will connect back to you to verify that you're real, and your system will confirm it, all transparently. Someday, it'll happen in real-time, maybe. Spammers won't be able to use this, because of the increased load on a server that must stay online as long as they want their mail delivered.
That's how change happens. Not because of a bunch of idealists get together and tell me to start PGP-signing my mail. You know what? I started doing that 3 years ago. I haven't once found a single person who even knew how to verify my messages. Not to mention the pathetic state that the keyservers are in, full of expired and forgotten keys, and easily corrupted (again, I know from experience - I corrupted my own keys in an attempt to remove them permanently).
-Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
I see this as a dangerous time. Many people have discussed going to an e-mail system that relies on encryption and security certificates. Are we going to end up with another debacle like we have now for secure websites, where Certificate Authorities like Verisign and Thawte charge hundreds of dollars every year for a certificate and free certificates set off more alarms than a than a Great White concert in a gasoline-soaked tent?
Will Microsoft make lucrative deals with high-roller Certificate Authorities to include them in the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server? Will you be unable to run a mail server without paying big bucks to some "trusted" Certificate Authority?
If we are not careful, the only e-mail servers that will exist will be commercial e-mail servers where the owners can afford hundreds of dollars every year for certificate renewals.
Why do I believe this? Because I follow the money. If Microsoft, Verisign/Thawte, Netscape, etc. think that there's a way to make money, they will push for a standard that ensures it.
Just what we need...another group of idiots trying to 'fundamentally change' things. I believe the IETF would be the appropriate place for changing things...
I would actively support a new email standard to solve the current problems, in particular spam. Here is an interesting article about CRN Test Center's anti-spam tool contest. The honorable mention solution looks like a great idea to me. It's basically consists of a white-list of people that never get filtered, a black-list of people that always get filtered. And if you're not on either list, the server responds to the sender with a challenge. If the challenge isn't answered, the email original email never gets delivered. This would cause severe headaches and money if spammers had to respond to "challenge" questions to get your email delivered. To those that say we won't ever be able to adopt a new standard consider this: Yahoo news ran a story the other day suggesting that, as Spam continues to increase and proliferate, it will eventually turn email into an unsuable and ineffective tool. Read it here.
Credibility of idea has been lost due to usage of the word "empower".
SMTP is here to stay and it won't change within any reasonable time period. It's unfortunate that it's so unsecure, but that's just the way it is.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first so that they wont be able to run away while you slowly torture them to death.
Just because SMTP can't be fixed (it can't) doesn't mean it has to die - just that a better alternative has to emerge. I'll keep my SMTP servers running indefinitely and I'll keep SMTP mail, but as better systems emerge I'll be telling people that the more reliable way to contact me is with methods that I know aren't going to give me the experience of picking through the trash when I check my mail. I'll still check my SMTP mail, but probably with decreasing frequency as time passes.
For those of you saying "just improve your filters," (1) give me a filter that can parse an HTML message containing only an image to determine whether it's spam or not (no, you can't reject all HTML mail or mail with attachments, if my brother drags-n-drops a picture of my nephew and clicks "send," I want to receive it), and (2) figure a way to keep the message from being delivered until that determination is made. Post-delivery filtering doesn't solve the bandwidth/cost/traffic problems.
Be courageous, people. Nobody screamed that we didn't need the telephone because the telegraph worked fine. Protocols emerge from changing circumstances. SMTP had its use over the last 30 years, but its time is waning with the onset of the global public internet full of untrusted senders seeking to abuse the system. It's time for a better protocol, and I applaud everyone involved in making a serious effort at developing one instead of trying to fix the unfixable.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I'm sick of reading proposals (often from industry profit-seeking types) who want to put a paid-for "stamp" or similar "token" on email. (I'm talking generally, though---yes---I did read this paper)
It looks attractive logic:
1. Lots of people use email
2. We offer a system which will beat spam at a cost---our 'trusted 3rd party' or whatever---but only if people who use it can't talk to anyone else, so everyone has to use it
3. Profit.
This is NOT the way forward on spam. Nor, realistically, is anything which re-writes the rules for email. People like editing headers. In fact, if it weren't for spam, people like email as it is---period.
The way forward seems simple:
smtp servers should start requiring genuine users to log in. (though rarely used, there are smtp systems which allow this, and most major clients---yes even the MS ones---already talk to these servers and have done for years)
servers which don't should quickly find their way onto blacklists.
(I shall leave the exact way these blacklists should be used as an exercise for the reader)
Simple. Low cost. Not a business model; but a clear solution.
Anyone want to start writing to ISPs?
How is this any different from having a global kerberos server that everyone authenticates to and then includes a signed checksum of the email message using ticket data.
/. has to carry it?
Almost sort of sounds like.... Passport!
The rose doesn't smell so sweet when it bears the name Microsoft does it?
Why is it that when some chick and dude get some stupid idea to make them famous, spend $50 bucks on a domain name, and post a website,
Next
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Many apps and distros offer multiple feeds.
A good example of this is the Linux kernel, those who want everything to work perfectly can use the stable(2.4.x at the moment) feed. Those who want the latest cutting edge features can use the unstable(2.5.x at the moment) feed.
Stable feeds are only updated to fix bugs and get no new features, so it doesn't have anyone introducing new bugs.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
How is this any different from having a global kerberos server that everyone authenticates to and then includes a signed checksum of the email message using ticket data.
/. has to carry it?
Almost sort of sounds like.... Passport!
The rose doesn't smell so sweet when it bears the name Microsoft does it?
Why is it that when some chick and dude get some stupid idea to make them famous, spend $50 bucks on a domain name, and post a website,
Next
How is this any different from having a global kerberos server that everyone authenticates to and then includes a signed checksum of the email message using ticket data.
/. has to carry it?
Almost sort of sounds like... Passport!
The rose doesn't smell so sweet when it bears the name Microsoft does it?
Why is it that when some chick and dude get some stupid idea to make them famous, spend $50 bucks on a domain name, and post a website,
Next
It is great that folks are taking this issue more seriously but how is improving the protocol for sending email going to deter spam? This seems analogous to discouraging annoying speech by changing languages.
On a fundamental level. Economics drives SPAM. People send it because they are making money. The most efficient way to stop SPAM is probably just to render it unprofitable somehow.
Developing a new solution is usually the best way to fix technical problems. But this is really a social/economic problem. New protocols, hardware, and software can make the environment less hospitable to SPAM but I doubt they will be an effective use of resources.
So I would say that we simply use what we currently have to take on spam and encrypt e-mail. Just a few thoughts...
The biggest reason why SMTP servers don't make users login is that it wouldn't matter. So long as *any* computer on the internet is authorized to send email as me, it doesn't matter if the one server that I actually use requires a login (particularly since most spam does not originate with a legitimate mail server; instead, it is sent by spam software using open relays and proxies).
In order to make this work, we also have to come up with a way of verifying the server (blacklists aren't enough; open relays and proxies get blacklisted now; spammers just switch machines). What I would suggest is adding a new type of record in DNS (call it an SMTP record for now). This record would verify that a particular IP is allowed to send email for the domain of the sender. This would eliminate the effectiveness of open relays and proxies. To get mail through, spammers would have to reveal their identity.
Note that this system still does not require any special certificates, just enhancements to what already exists.
It is great that folks are taking this issue more seriously but how is improving the protocol for sending email going to deter spam? This seems analogous to discouraging annoying speech by changing languages.
On a fundamental level. Economics drives SPAM. People send it because they are making money. The most efficient way to stop SPAM is probably just to render it unprofitable somehow.
Developing a new solution is usually the best way to fix technical problems. But this is really a social/economic problem. New protocols, hardware, and software can make the environment less hospitable to SPAM but I doubt they will be an effective use of resources.
No, stupid idea. And there's no need. The war on spam is being win, not lost. Spammers are increasingly desperate. They're now resorting to outright criminal cracking, writing worms to send spam through. They don't do that because open relay raping is working.
The best way to solve email problems is buy having the email hosted on the users server that sent the email. The email would essentially be a link to the users server with the option of opening it. If spammers had to host and maitain the traffic of incoming users they would crumble.
Is not to reinvent the protocol. Spammers will disappear if nobody reads their spam (because it will be too ineffective, even at a cheap price).
The better solution is simple - let me rate the"trustworthiness" of the sender who sends me email and sort it appropriately. I can add all my family and friends to the "explicitly trusted" list. Then, the server can allow for an option such as "possibly trusted", which might include all emails from the same domain I'm in, or from domains I specify (e.g. *@mit.edu).
All other email will be tagged as "untrusted". Now, I can set my email browser to color code them, simply ignore them, or set a rule for each category. Yahoo! already does this, showing a smiley face with the emails that come from people in my address book
This can be done simply, and without rewriting any protocols. Beware people who want to reinvent the wheel to gain profit when there is no need. "Pit certification" is unnecessary, and too costly.
-Mark Radulovich, CISSP
Of course it is possible but, the probability is very low, in my opinion. It is already possible for most modern mail clients to automatically encrypt and decrypt mail, making them secure. Yet very few people use PGP or S/MIME. It is already possible for most MTAs to use SSL and/or TLS to encrypt their communications, yet most still do not use this feature. It is already possible for most POP3 and IMAP4 servers to encrypt their communications using SSL and/or TLS as well as having four or more secure authentication options available, yet most still do not use this feature.
It is possible to redesign and rebuild the email infrastructure of the internet in such a way as to completely eliminate spam and forged addresses, it is howeber improbable that good old insecure and vulnerable SMTP will be abandoned. Prior to the internet and standardization on SMTP, there were many secure mail systems around the world. There was also an inability for them to communicate with each other. This is the problem with a new system. In order for it to work and for email to remain a useful tool, everyone will have to switch and everyone will have to do it at the same time. This is highly improbable.
-Begin Rant-
The problem with spam is simple: the old rule that we should be forgiving about what we accept and strict about what we send.
We could wipe spam out, or at least render it controllable, if we simple required proper DNS entries (A, MX, PTR) and proper server configuration (HELO information, etc.)
Unfortunately, every Tom, Dick and Harry feels it is his god-given right to run a mail server despite having ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what is required to run one. The sheer number of people without postmaster and abuse accounts is astonishing and both are required. The sheer number of people without matching forward and reverse DNS entries is astonishing. The number of people who call their server "Blah" and then put in a DNS entry for "mail" without an entry for "Blah" is amazing. Although this last part is not required by the RFC's, why on earth should I have to look through my logs and see "Blah" when there is no DNS entry for it? How am I supposed to troubleshoot?
Oh well, I give up.
-End Rant-
Now we are told once more that the best cure against spam should be to reinvent something to replace the tried-and-true eMail system of decade-old reliability, just because some sociopaths apparently cannot learn to behave without getting a spanking (or jail time) and U.S. privacy laws are still too weak to stop the spam.
And after all the years that spam has plagued the networks, that's quite a poor achievement for a nation that managed to outlaw junk faxes, and had confirmation from the courts that regulating advertising does pass constitutional muster perfectly well:
Subsequently, numerous decisions have also made it crystal clear, over and over again, that neither the First Amendment nor the Dormant Commerce Clause are an obstacle to outlawing electronic spam, by fax or any kind of eMail.
Nor is it at the expense of any legitimate business. Industry itself can't stand the spam anymore.
This is not about "lawmakers never knowing enough about the Internet to regulate any aspect of it in a meaningful way", it's about doing something to prevent imposing compulsory changes to technology that keep fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.
Congress should get over such shameful cowardice and make the simple law that's needed and proven to work.
There is no need to re-engineer the Internet.
There is no justification for widespread surveillance and data retention under the poor excuse of trying to track down spammers.
There is no risk of banning mailing lists or commercial eMail.
There is no doubt what the sociopathic behavior is.
All that is needed is mandatory opt-in for unsolicited bulk eMail (encompassing all kinds of electronic messaging).
And yet some self-proclaimed "experts on electronic advertising" (whose only merit probably is that they know how to spam because they've done it a trillion times at everyone else's expense) keep pretending that opt-in wasn't legal, or feasible, or desirable.
Opt-in works, and it does not hurt anyone but the spammers.
Europe has adopted it, Australia is adopting it (how far behind do you want the U.S. to be, are we to wait for China to outlaw spam before the U.S. will?!), but most importantly the USA have successfully adopted it themselves against junk faxes.
There's probably something wrong in Washington D.C., and the news media in general, when the most insightful newspaper article on the issue comes from USA Today.
Be sure to fax or eMail it to your congress(wo)man though.
Don't spam them, but do attach some selected masterpieces of spam if you think they need an idea of what ends up in the inbox of their constituents, and of their children, 9 billion times, every single day.
Have the SMTP amended so that MTAs perform a DNS check on the previous server, and if it doesnt match correct the header. With guarenteed un-forged headers then at least reporting will be a hell of alot easier.
Heh. It'll be just like buying a cert for your SSL server, the big boys (Thawte and crew) will get hardcoded into the big clients (Outlook and crew). Others' email, who generated their own secure key (even with PKI) will generate a dialog in the big clients telling you its not safe, or it'll just drop it as spam. Here we go.
It's easy to pass legislation to forbid something.
Enforcing it, however, is a whole different kettle of fish.
Perhaps you recall a small part of US history called Prohibition?
SPAM ( and I refer to fraudulent headers, abuse of open relays here as SPAM) is already breaking the law, it's called Fraud.
Opt-In means nothing unless you have a means to detemine whom is breaking the law. The real problem is tracking SPAM back to the source, which is a technical problem, not a legislative nor social problem.
Anything is possible given time and money.
I'd prefer challenge response to that.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
I think there's a fundamental difference between the problems IPV6 is trying to solve and what any "SMTP2" solution is trying to solve.
IPV6 will solve the underlying problem of running out of IP space.
"SMTP2" would NOT solve the spam problem, because it's not a technical problem, IMHO. Spammers would move over to "SMTP2" eventually. They'd just have to find that one little flaw or feature and they'd be back exploiting it like they're exploiting weaknesses in SMTP now.
If widespread adoption of "SMTP2" takes anywhere near the amount IPV6 adoption is taken, it's not going to work. Spammers would have 5 years to study the new technology and develop solutions to get their crap across the new protocol.
By the time "SMTP2" is in place and used by everybody, the spam problem would no longer be what it is now and we'd be back in the cat-and-mouse game with spammers and their spamware techniques.
All the "SMTP2" solutions I've seen would make normal Email communication between non-spammers much more difficult. I think that's something that should be avoided, even at the cost of not solving the spam problem using technology solutions.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Perhaps I take offense too easily to words like this, but there has got to be a better way of discussing the current state of security certificates other than making an offhand reference to a tragedy less than three months ago that killed 100 people. Your post is otherwise well thought out and valuable to this discussion.
It's a shame that seemingly all the time people joke about or take lightly incidents like these. Taking an event like the Columbia disaster or the West Warwick, RI, fire and including it in a typical Slashdot discussion (e.g. how to combat spam, Windows vs. Linux, etc.) does a create disservice to those who perished in that event. Alas, nothing, not even life and death, seems sacred these days...
We just have to accept the fact that we have lost the war with Spam and learn to live with it in our daily lives. I have, and am a lot better for it;
I have learned over 400 ways to refinance my house, increased my penis size by 5 times, heard from lots of hot slutty girls that want to hang out with me, Cured my erectile dysfunction disorder, saved money on Norton Antivirus, and will become a millionaire once I mail out the five letters stuffed with a dollor and my name at the bottom of the list.
There is a lot of good information out there that I have benefitted from and I did not even have to leave to my house! I even forward all of the good opportunities I receive to all of my family and friends.
Does something need to be done? Latest numbers I've heard are that 40% of email are spam. I would say something needs to be done.
/or server PK signatures automagically added along the way. Initially, clients could be configured by users to reject message that don't have the credentials the recipient requires, but eventually the server would reject unsigned messages, and signed messages that did not come from the server that supposedly signed them.
Current filters may work somewhat. Some may have tuned them to work very well. Two problems. Most people are not smart enough to "tune well", and even with filters, the messages are still usually delivered and stored in a holding pattern for retrieval in case filters are too tight. Again, the less knowledgeable will not check their holding area enough, and admin overhead will increase.
Unless we start allowing the UN to write and enforce laws over the planet, legislation will not work. Spammers will move offshore. Currently, spammers can move out of state and avoid prosecution in the states that currently have laws.
I also do not agree with the "fee" solution.
While this recommendation does have it's problems, I see no one suggesting a better alternative. Yet. Hopefully someone will. This is similar to a solution a friend and I zeroed in on, except we thought to keep smtp, with user and
The problem of distributing keys is troublesome. But, there are many smart people reading and/or thinking about this. If instead of throwing our hands up and saying there is no solution, and more people thought about it, maybe something could be done.
is one based on peer-maintained and user-maintained trust. I have written the outlines for such an approach.
.@.
Now we can have SECURE spam!
Have you considered that DNS is often controlled by people who don't control SMTP?
Example: ISP ownes the IP and give you 1 IP for your SMTP server.
Or if you have multiple switched internet links for redundancy? Link goes down - you switch IP's to route around problem (switch providers)... but you can't force DNS cache to instantly update.
Also consider clusters. What if you have 3 machines, which need their own name for hardware management, but they are all acting as a single mail exchange host? Yes, I know about multiple MX records - clustering solves other issues. You can combine clustering + MX records.
Bottom line: It costs extra money and time to get your own block of IP Addresses and properly manage DNS. AOL can do it, but so what? Why lock out the small mail servers of the world just because they don't have reverse DNS?!
Mail comes into my USPS mailbox in front of my house. The "FROM:" server does not have to exist to come to the TO: location.
Yes, SPAM is a problem, but quit blaming protocols and technology with the issue is the small percentage of e-mail users who are _sending_ the spam.
RoundSparrow
Why would it fail? Look how quickly some existing protocols have been adopted.... Such as ICQ, AIM, Gnutella. Are there alternatives? Of course. You could use IRC instead of ICQ or AIM. You could use FTP instead of Gnutella.
The people (sometimes just one person) who developed those protocols and standards didn't say "It will never happen".
...blah...blah..."they've become a hopeless nightmare for users and ISPs alike," said Weinstein
...yiddy...yaddi..yadda..."These problems are getting more severe every day," said Neumann
"Aren't these two people PFIR?? If so, why are they quoting themselves?!?!?" Said thrillbert.
---
I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.
-- G. B. Shaw
I think you misunderstand. Certificate-based SMTP is not designed to eliminate spam.
It will make anti-spam techniques easier by allowing people to keep more reliable block lists with less 'collateral damage'.
The other nice side-effect of "SMTP2" is that it solves the open relay problem indirectly by legacying all of those old misconfigured servers with no administrator.
From their webpage:
A key aspect of the Tripoli environment is the concept of a third-party certified, encrypted authentication token that would be cryptographically linked with every e-mail message. Within the Tripoli architecture, this token is referred to by the acronym "PIT" (Payload Identity Token, henceforth referred to as "Pit") and is at the core of Tripoli.
It is anticipated that all Pits considered acceptable by the vast majority of all Tripoli-compliant software user would be digitally signed by one or more designated, trustworthy, third-pary authorities who would be delegated the power to certify the validity of identity and other relevant information within Pits.
This doesn't add anything that S/MIME or PGP singed mail doesn't alrady do. And it will fail for the same reasons, putting the public key infrastructure in place is prohibitive.
It worked for https at the expense of creating the VeriSign tax, but the number of https enabled websites are few compared to the number of people using e-mail.
Ofcourse, if we bend over and hand over our e-mail to VeriSign we might finally de-throne Bill as the richest guy around...
Your example is a bad one. Microsoft did its best to avoid starting over with its operating systems. And when it did, it did so very carefully with as much backwards compability as possible.
Windows will still run MS-DOS binaries and Windows 1.0 through Windows ME all ran atop the MS-DOS code base in one way or another. They started over exactly once, when they build NT. And they gave it over 7 years to mature before they dumped the old MS-DOS/Windows code. And even with this one example, they ensured it was as compatible as possible to the old, which is why almost any program written for Windows 95 (and many written for earlier OSs, too) will still work with XP, 7+ years later.
Operating systems are a particularly good analogy, too because, like e-mail, it is a critical piece of infrastructure that depends heavily on interoperating with what else is out there.
The "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over TLS" (STARTTLS for short) defined by RFC 2487 already provides the technical framework for Tripoli. And is today supported by Sendmail, Exchange, Postfix, Exim, etc.
It normally runs over TCP port 25, the initial connection is normal SMTP, then the STARTTLS directive begins a TLS-encrypted session. STARTTLS can be configured to only accept mail sent with a trusted certificate, or to allow anyone to connect - it is compatible with existing SMTP.
The one additional item in the Tripoli proposal is the use of a trusted third party to validate certificates. Great if this can be made to work, though current experiences with PKI make me doubtful of a truly Public Infrastructure. But STARTTLS can certainly work amongst smaller private user groups.
One current hurdle preventing wholesale adoption is that few ISPs support STARTTLS. Not a problem for people running their own mail servers, though even they would want secondary servers to support STARTTLS. But if the core ISPs started using STARTTLS, they could mutually authenticate each other. Initially all mail could be accepted, but later on unauthenticated mail could be filtered more rigorously.
Andrew Yeomans
The difference with prohibition is that most people WANTED ALCOHOL. How many want breast enlargement? Child-rape piccys? Goatse.cx?
Big difference.
I think these ideas are on the right track in that they acknowledge the largest fault with the current email system to be lack of control over accounts by the owner of the accounts. However, the hazy ideas that are hinted at as solutions are not the right idea. They are overburdensome to implement, and I can still think of plenty of ways around them.
As for getting people to begin moving to a new system, it will need to be more than just certificate additions and user controlled filters. It will need to be something that end users can immediately understand as "this is better and easier". With the given proposals, people will have no incentive to change. that attitude will be, "Sure, I'm told the new thingy is better, but I'd rather just deal with the spam than have to deal with something new that I dont understand." End users mostly have the attitude of, "If i do nothing, I can still get my emails. If I change to something new, I might break something and be without my daily communications".
That will be where the big hurdle is.
yeah, you get to pay less.
That's free as in beer.
Free Speech software means it will never be obsolete because you can always recompile on a newer machine.
BTW where in the world does one find free beer anyway. At a 4-6 pints per game the hockey playoffs are starting to get expensive.
There have been many new proposals for making email spamless, but let's face it: most of them suck. The only way to curb spam is to force responsibility on ISPs and any person or organization that is running a public mail server with the law (setting public standards are what laws are for, folks).
We don't need any fancy legislation (but some simple legislation is necessary). The government repeatedly proves it's ineptitude when it comes to these matters, so we must only trust them with the little that necessity requires. A federal registrar of email servers should be enough, and a few rules should be made about operating these servers:
1) It would be illegal to run a non-registered email server.
2) Lawbreakers will be penalized with a hefty fine and jail time for every count of illegal activity.
3) PROFIT! (just kidding)
4) The server admin would be partly responsible for the messages that go through his/her server.
I know that these may be incomplete, but if anyone is willing, let's put our heads together and come up with something. There is no reason why we need to give up any liberty at all.
But there is a difference between legislating junk faxes and legislating spam. In the case of junk faxes, almost all of them (used to) originate from inside the US, due to the prohibitive cost of setting up offshore. It's easy for the US to pass legislature governing an activity that can realistically only occur in the US. In the case of email, unless we involve the UN or something crazy like this, spammer need only move offshore just out of reach of the long arm of the US law. Unless we are going to pull an Iraq on every country that doesn't implement our spam/intellectualy property laws, this won't work.
Almost a valid point. The people who wanted alcohol didn't prevent the passage of the law though, so they can't be "most" (leave our democracy workings aside for a moment).
There are a number of people that want to SEND spam, they are the ones who equate to your people that wanted alcohol and are the ones MOST of us wish to stop or at least be able to choose it ignore.
Anything is possible given time and money.
As usual with basically good ideas, there is a fly in the ointment.
In this case, it is who gets to certify, and which certifiers are going to be recognized by the community as valid and desireable.
The answer is the likely certifiers are going to be the ISPs. Let's face it - they have been winnowed down to a manageable number, they are the entry point for all e-mail users, and they will be recognized as an authority by the majority of users, who are mostly casual anyway.
Moreover, they are the only ones who can guarantee that they will get paid for their work.
I love the idea that Tripoli wants to empower the user, but I think their scheme will do just as much to empower ISPs.
In FTP, the client tells the server what IP it's at. The server then makes a connection to the client. Wouldn't this sort of thing help prevent spoofing and getting a "true" IP that we can then put in the headers?
...Matt
Would this not help solve the "non-tracability" of spam?
This sort of thing could be optional at first.
So hopefully, over time, the ends closest to the end-users will have more and more Received: lines that are the new way and various servers/end users could opt to reject mails that aren't 100% new-style received headers.
The only way to spoof headers then would be to forge it, but then someone's gotta talk to a back-connect server which will yield a true IP which would be tracable.
I've had the same idea, even going so far as to tinker with code to insert a SHA1 hash into the headers of the message. This way the systems that do not know what to do can ignore it and those that are interested can check the DS.
The problem of distributing keys is troublesome. But, there are many smart people reading and/or thinking about this. If instead of throwing our hands up and saying there is no solution, and more people thought about it, maybe something could be done.
The key could always be attached to the message you send. Granted this would increase the size of the message, but it would not be any worse than people always sending their vCard. Perhaps the system would only send the signature the first time you sent an email to a person.
Their proposal includes three different and only loosely related issues:
1. User in control
2. Encryption for privacy
3. External certificates for authentication.
To put it bluntly, the primary issue is authentication. The control and privacy issues are, admittedly, dear to some people's hearts, but if anyone thinks that encryption will keep government agencies out of your e-mail, that person has an unrealistic view of the world.
So that leaves us with authentication. All that is needed here is an agreement among several major ISPs (AOL, Earthlink, anyone?) to set up secure links between their servers, and only tag e-mail as authenticated if it provably comes from one of their users.
The rest of it should be rather straightforward.
John Roth
LOTS of spam is passed through open relays. Closing Sendmail open relays has been easy for A LONG TIME now. Yet hundreds of open relays still exist. A new protocol is spiffy and all BUT WE CAN'T GET PEOPLE TO USE THE EXISTING TOOLS. A new 'magic bullet' ain't the answer, education is, boycott may be, and use of blacklists can help. Implementation of Tripoli is nice and all but if we can't get people to upgrade to a sendmail/qmail/... with closed relay support how do we get them to upgrade to Tripoli? Figure that out and then use the same method to get the open relay holes closed with the existing tools and save the Tripoli coding time. Hell, spammers that spam from their own address get blacklisted pretty quick, use the blacklist, and close the relays.
(Yeah, I know the blacklists aren't perfect but we can't even get that to work, a new tool isn't likely to work either.)
Bottom line, this is not REALLY a technology issue, it's a LUSER/Business issue. A new technology that penetrates 20-60% of the net still gets spam from the other 40-80% of the net. Tech answers work great IF you get 100% market penetration.
And your example of real-time authentication won't stop a spammer. Won't even slow him down much. SSBs (Spam Service Bureaus) will just go out to Best Buy and pick up a couple of quad-P4 boxes to handle the authentication traffic, lie during the authentication (ethically no different than forging From: and Received: headers) and life will go on as before. Remember, spammers' servers are already online for the duration of a spam run. Without a Trusted Third Party involved in the authentication chain, you have to trust the (possibly unknown and/or unknowable) other party not to lie to you.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
first:
"People For Internet Responsibility"
They propose to interduce a standard to enforce responsibility? ludicrious, you can not standardize responsibility.
The change they, and many others, propose to deal with spam takes away a lot of the freedom that legitimate user need.
Perhaps I need to send an email to a coworker who isn't bathing? I would need to do it anonymously so as to prevent lawsuits, and lessen a hostile tone.
What if I am fighting an oppressive government?
Would there have ever benn a deep throat* if anonyminity couldn't be assurd?
And they can not stop spam without ending anonymity.
Spam is becoming the great excuse to loose control of something very precious, the ability to speak you mind and not fear reprocussions. Does this cause a lot of chaffe? of course, can't have one without the other.
The way to stoip spam is through education. The only law I would like to see would be to force people selling merchindise to put a code into the body. then you could filter out those, but you still would need a spam filter to remove the non legitament, and foriegn spam.
*not the movie, but the Nixon scandle.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Encryption & establishing identity go hand-in-hand. I work for one of the largest PPO's in the nation. It is of the upmost importance that identity can be established in addition to providing a secure means to get there.
I need to know that not only can nobody but the recipient get my message, but that said recipient is who they claim to be.
I am in the middle of discussions of trying to move us off of tumbleweed (a la hotmail type secure email) and on to pgp/gpg. I would like to hear more about your experience/difficulties with pgp/gpg (I don't have any. but then again, I've been using pgp since 1997, so any difficulties I might have remembered are forgotten in light of the tumbleweed project).
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Don't we already have this? It turned out to be too much of a PITA to use, hence the current quagmire...
Public Key authenticated mail, backed up with a whitelist, and actualy following the rules for PGP key admission (i.e. there needs to be a place you can register your key with that will certify that it belongs specificly to you)
Why are stupid (as in very silly) names like "People for the ethical treatment of animals", "Grand Parents for A Drug Free America", "Drug Abuse Resistance Education" or "Parents for barefoot children" all the rage in the US?.
Oh.. and SMTP rocks my world. Unsafe means free and uncontrollable. You know what your govnerment lusts for.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
how does your computer "Know" for sure that the email really is from your friends or family? ... looks at the from: header field right?
the next step in the spamming war is they will begin hijacking people's address books.
without something like the PCA in the proposal (certificate) there isn't any way to tell if the email really is from your friend/family/remote system crying for help/etc.
I'm not sure how many folks are aware that VeriSign bought Thawte a few years back:
Registrant:
VeriSign, Inc. (THAWTE-DOM)
487 East Middlefield Road
Mountain View, CA 94043
US
Domain Name: THAWTE.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
VeriSign Hostmaster (VH2134-ORG) vshostmaster@VERISIGN.COM
VeriSign, Inc.
487 East Middlefield Road
Mountain View, CA 94043
US
650-961-7500
Fax- 650-961-7300
Techies like you and I do, and I would rather cast my lot with fellow techies who share in my pain.
Success comes from failure if you dare to try again, revise, adapt, and overcome. I don't see why we should continue to bend over for spammers if the possibility exists that they will exploit a new system for mail transfer.
Personally, the SMTP system has rendered e-mail useless. I'd accept a challenge system, whitelists, or whatever else someone comes up with if it meant I could communicate with my family and friends effectively. As it stands, 100-200 spam messages are jamming the transmission.
the PIT things have been proposed under other names in numerous other proposals. PKI is complex in and of itself, so I don't see how taking two hard problems (spam and PKI) and combining them is going to help solve the spam problem. As others have observed the CA is effectively a black list moderator. Spammers can set up their own CAs. And it discriminates against anonymity and privacy. It is not in the users interests to non-repudiably sign each email just to combat spam. Hashcash combined with content based filters like spamassassin makes more sense in that at least it attacks the problem: by making the sender pay (in CPU time) on a scale that costs normal senders effectively nothing (they already have spare CPU) but increases the costs of sending spam. The filtering software would then just not filter your email if it had a hashcash token attached. This means users have an incentive to install hashcash plugins in their mailers to avoid their mail getting lost in filtering false positives. hashcash is at: http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/ Adam
"Opt-in works, and it does not hurt anyone but the spammers."
I would say
"Opt-in works, and it does not hurt anyone but the spammers, whose business nobody wants."
this way yiu can use that argument against spammer when they say "People want this information" Fine, now we have a way to save the spammers time (they don't have to spam people who won't buy anyways) and it will save those eople who do not wish to participate.
This sounds great to congress, and the only respose spammer can say is, "well, we sell to people who don't really need to proiduct anyways."
and quite frankly, they won't get much sympathy
for that.
Alway make is sound like both sides win, that way its a 'compormise'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
change the name. Triple E = _Empowered_ Email Environment? Give me a break!
Hmm, lots of comments to the effect "well, if you just don't read the spam it'll go away." Bzzt, wrong! By the time the spam gets to your smtp server *it's already too late* even if you just discard the spam. The reason being you have already paid for the bandwidth to download the spam so your fancy pants filter can download it, analyze it and discard it, not to mention the cpu cycles it takes to analyze incoming e-mail. It gets even worse if your filter is consulting an external database for every piece of mail flowing through the system.
Until the burden is placed on the *sender* to verify they are sending legitimate communication everyone else in the chain is going to lose. The sender doesn't pay for transporting their garbage over the wires to get to your smtp gateway and be discarded. Filtering is a half assed and ineffective solution to the spam issue - it places the computational and financial burden on the wrong party in this transaction.
So stop your blubbering - if you want to effectively control spam you're going to have to accept some burden as a sender to verify who you are and that you are sending legitimate e-mail. One of the advantages of a global authentication/credential scheme is that those credentials can be revoked if they are abused (ie, it creates a layer of accountability). Of course, you get the whole thorny issue of who gets the authority to assign and revoke credentials, and as one poster said a bad authority will make such a scheme worse than no scheme at all.
If you make the PCAs non-centralized to the point where relatively small organizations can function as a PCA, then there are so many of them that some hierarchy of PCAs has to be set up, ala DNS, or else you dramatically increase the load on mail servers which will already need more CPU for cryptographic processing by making them check long lists of PCA IPs to see if anyone has the key for the message they're trying to validate.
Here's a better (though still flawed) idea, which assumes a symmetric public key system can be used:
Set up a Domain Key System (DKS) where every host on the internet has a defined DKS primary and secondary server.
If desired, the MAPS people can charge for the more frequent updates of their list (every 5 min, for instance) thus supporting their servers.
A bonus of this system allows easy encrypted e-mail... your e-mail client just looks up the public key of the destination user in the DKS, encrypts the message with it, then calculates the checksum and armors that with the sender's public key before sending. The receiving server can validate this e-mail as coming from a given sender, and only the holder of the private key that matches the destination address can read it.
Minimal changes to the existing SMTP server software are needed to implement this system, and I think no? changes to BIND style DNS.
The system scales linearly with the number of users... if you have a mail server supporting 10,000 users, your DNS server had better support them too. A single user can have a tiny server that supports publishing their single key, perhaps the same as their SMTP host, and perhaps only transiently on the Internet (long enough to send a message), although this prohibits receipt of encrypted e-mail.
If you manage to set up a central key authority somehow, for bonus credit you can allow the DKS keys to be kept in armored form in the DNS servers, decrypted only by the public key of the central authority, which will provide the armored key to the e-mail user upon verifying the user's identity
Is for Bush to declare a "War on Spam", get Congress to authorize the funding (much $$), and that will take care of it very nicely. No more spam! Hormel will have to change their product name to something like "Liberty Meat".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Is e-mail address portability. So that if your mail provider gets shut down for allowing spamming, you can transfer to another with minimal disruption
Rich
Example: ISP ownes the IP and give you 1 IP for your SMTP server.
So? Get them to add a PTR record for you. If they won't do it, then you are probably not supposed to be running a server on that account.
Or if you have multiple switched internet links for redundancy? Link goes down - you switch IP's to route around problem (switch providers)... but you can't force DNS cache to instantly update.
What the hell does this have to do with anything? All I said is that every IP should have a reverse DNS entry and that your HELO information provide a FQDN which has a valid A record and/or MX record. I never said this had to _match_ the PTR and A records in DNS. Besides which, nobody in their right mind handles HA this way. You run BGP4 and configure real redundancy. Don't know how to run BGP4? then perhaps you should not be worried about HA.
Also consider clusters. What if you have 3 machines, which need their own name for hardware management, but they are all acting as a single mail exchange host? Yes, I know about multiple MX records - clustering solves other issues. You can combine clustering + MX records.
If a cluster has a single IP, then nothing I suggested would pose a problem. If the cluster has unique IP addresses, then each one should correspond to a Unique DNS entry. Period. Please read RFC 1912.
Bottom line: It costs extra money and time to get your own block of IP Addresses and properly manage DNS. AOL can do it, but so what? Why lock out the small mail servers of the world just because they don't have reverse DNS?!
First, anyone running a mail server _should_ have a business class account of some sort. With that comes DNS, Reverse DNS, IP blocks, etc. (Hell a lot of non-business class accounts give you these features). The problem is, people who have no business running mail servers do so, and do so poorly. I am absolutely astonished at the kinds of questions people ask on the Postfix and qmail mailing lists. Every time I read one of their posts I am forced to ask myself how these people managed to get connected to the Internet in the first place.
Mail comes into my USPS mailbox in front of my house. The "FROM:" server does not have to exist to come to the TO: location.
That this doesn't bother you is a problem. If the sender doesn't exist, why the hell would you accept anything from them?
Yes, SPAM is a problem, but quit blaming protocols and technology with the issue is the small percentage of e-mail users who are _sending_ the spam.
If you read my post you would notice I never blamed the protocols. What I blame are the plethora of inexperienced or downright incompetent administrators out there.
-sirket
So uh, what's insightful about the parent comment?
"Tripoli -- nobody is going to use it" -- FreeLinux, 2003
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981
"There's no possible reason anyone would ever want to have a computer in their home" -- Ken Olson, 1977
"I think that there may be a world market for maybe five computers" -- Thomas J. Watson, 1943
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" -- Irving Fischer, 1929
"This wireless music box [the radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay
to hear a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- RCA Executives, 1920
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers - 1927
"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible" -- Lord Kelvin, 1895
"I'm gonna get laid this year" -- FreeLinux, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
Just being a curmudgeon, just saying "feh", is not insightful.
Junk faxes might be illegal but we get a dozen or so every week. Bet you do too. So don't be too confident that a law will stop spam.
Democrat delenda est
It would work. I have concieved of such a system for years. It's rather obvious. But the problem with tripoli is that it's trying to achieve too much.
Encryption is a seperate issue and should be addressed sepereatly. Signed messages in no way have to be encrypted. Besided various powers that be against encryption would assert they influence against it becoming standard as much as possible.
A signed message infrastructe is the heart of the spam solution and it needs to be made plain and simple.
But where Tripoli erred in overcomplicating it with encryption it should have rather enphasised development of sponsorship signatue key lists and public key list databases and software that to some extent automatically manages it all. This would allow more control power than individually authorizing each email sender. (I don't know about you but I get annoyed authorizing all the damned cookies all over the web.)
I like the idea of adding a cost to sending mail. Pouring out millions and millions of spam mail is just too damn cheap.
;D
But, unlike some, I don't think we should add a cost in terms of real-life currency. That might create more issues than the problem it solves.
Instead, let's use something more readily available: computing resources. I belive there are quite a few algorithms where creating a challenge is trivial, while coming up with the solution takes some effort. One extra second, or ten, wouldn't make a lot of impact on normal users, but imagine the time it would take to send out a million spam mail.
_____________
However, doing something like this between servers/relays is probably a no-no, which puts us back to square one..
How about just configuring mail-servers so they automatically check whether the server they're receiving a message from is an open relay, and in that case just deny the message?
Depending on some signing authority to end spam is stupid. Spammers will just buy keys like they buy disposable AOL accounts unless the price is high enough to be a burden on small sites.
Expecting laws to stop people who already make hiding their true identity and crossing as many jurisdictions as possible because they are usually selling ILLEGAL products is insane.
In the end there is only ONE solution. It is the use of encryption/signing, but not the way most people think of using it. Mail User Agents need the following fixes, made so that the average AOL/Outlook user can handle it. By default they only accept mail from people already in the address book. All mail is sent GPG/PGP signed, with the public key attached and the clients grab keys automatically.
When an mail arrives from someone that isn't in the address book it sends them a challenge that only a human can answer (more on this below). If that test passes it allows the original message through and sticks the public key in the addressbook. If the message was not signed it stores the address of the SMTP server it came from as a backwards compatible fallback. The end result is that legit senders only get challenged once if their client signs, otherwise they get challenged once each time they send from a different server. Spammers have to have a human involved for each spam for each user which kills the attraction of the practice.
Now, about those challenge methods that only a human can solve. Make that a plugin architecture. Have modules that send a multiple choice question or two, some that send text as a graphic in some whacked way, etc. Allow people to express their personality through their choice of verification method.
This suggestion would kill spam dead, put only a minimal burden on legit traffic and require no laws or centralization of the Internet. Which is why Outlook will never implement it and therefore the problem will continue to fester.... until enough people become willing to trade liberty for what? In this case, mere convenience.
Democrat delenda est
I have thought about this for awhile now, and this is what I would like to use.
If an email author is not on my whitelist of emails, then they get a toll if they want to get through and have me download/read their letter. I can set the toll according to my own private rules. For me, it would be likely in the range of 1-10 cents (a professional might set a bounty of 20-50 cents for a stranger's email). One of my first private rules would be to double the toll if it is an HTML-formatted email, and triple the toll if their is attachments.
There is no assumption that the letter is spam content or not or restriction of speech, just that the sender will pay me for their taking of my time regardless. For 99.9% of spammers it is not feasible to pay a few cents per spam, but if they can spend that much to contact me then I am likely a likely enough target market for their service that they can pay me the money for me to skim their message.
I would have the implementation similar to how "Read receipt" messages get sent back, but instead of a dialog box that says "Mr. Jones requested a read receipt, do you wish to send it?" it would say "Mr. Jones charges a toll of 3 cents to receive unsolicited emails from people he doesn't know. Do you wish to pay this 3 cents?" There would be a "Yes/No" button to send the 3 cents to him.
There is no forcing of users to exact tolls on reading unsolicited mails, if they don't want to use this, but instead want to read them all for free, that is their choice.
The specifications would be by a internet body, like W3C or similar. The implementation would then be over to a choice of independent transaction service companies, similar to how there is a vast consumer choice of registrars for domains. Consumers can take a service that comes with lots of handholding, 24/7 live support but costs a larger percentage of the toll charged to unsolicited non-whitelisted email, or a consumer can choose a non-frills provider that gives 95% of the toll charge to the reader of the email. Consumers may wish to base part of their choice based on the perceived trustworthyness/reputation of the company. Companies that do a good job at it get more business, making a good market opportunity for companies that do the service well.
For a company to be a provider of the service requires some minimum standards, pretty much similar to the standards to become an OpenSRS domain registrar. [As an aside on the subject of domain names, consider how much more junk domain names would flood the domain name registry if there wasn't a cheap cost of $6-15/year to have a domain name. 99.9% of sociopathic people are physically limited from registering 80 million new domain names per day into the DNS, because there is a cost-prohibitive toll against this abuse]. There is a somewhat stiff cost to become one, obviously, and there is a contract regarding arbitation before the council in cases of fraud or other repeat poor performance, with th e penalty of damages and the stripping of the ability to provide the service. The cost of becoming one is set high enough to make it an unviable business to defraud your customers.
I pay a fixed amount into my own chosen provider of my toll/bounty service, say about $10 for my upcoming year or two of contacting people that I don't know yet. Transactions are then handled from provider of service to provider of service moving the few cents without much human intervention and pretty low risk since there is only the short list of provider accounts that money can be sent to. Since there is low interaction and relatively low financial risk, there is a good slice of money available to be given to the bounty recipients.
Why would I use it? Since it handles my needs as both a reader and sender of email:
-I currently lose a large amount of time in dealing with the current mess of spam, where I have to sift through non-whitelisted messages looking for something important from a potential employer or an old friend that I haven't seen in a while. I
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Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
Perhaps I'm a journalist... and the sender -- a corporate whistleblower, or the person who obtains the next Pentagon Papers, or a Venezuelan revolutionary -- wishes to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.
Anonymity doesn't make you a criminal any more than publicity makes you a saint.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This COULD work... I think some people are forgetting an important aspect of the MTA/PCA issue: What's to stop people from becoming their *own* "trusted authority"? I mean, why rely on someone ELSE -- some big ISP or "Certificate Authority" (Verisign, etc) -- to ultimately say who is trustworthy TO YOU and who isn't? Why not rely on YOURSELF? (or your trusted friends?) From my reading of the paper *anyone* could ultimately become an "authority", determining who is and who is not allowed to send email to a given person (with the "given person" in this case being oneself). Thus I can envision a sort of "peer-to-peer" email delivery network arising from this idea wherein everyone, over time, builds their own database of "trusted sources" that would be allowed to send them email (or rather, whose email a person would be willing to accept email FROM). A private "white list" if you will. With this approach we each only accept email from individuals/organizations that WE OURSELVES trust, -or-, optionally (on an individual by individual basis), who are trusted by others whose judgement we ourselves trust. The email delivery "network" would thus reduce to everyone/anyone participating in the delivery/authentication of email, ala the old "circle of friends" approach. You want to send me email? Fine. Then you need to either be someone I personally know (and thus someone I myself trust; i.e. a friend) or else someone who knows someone I trust (i.e. a "friend of one of my friends"). If you're not one of those types of people, then I'm not interested in receiving your email. Full stop. Each person could configure their own levels of trust (i.e. how far removed from their own close circle of friends someone could be and still be allowed to send you email). The spammers would end up quickly developing their own "circle of friends", sending and delivering their spam amongst themselves (and/or amongst demented individuals who liked receiving such junk) whereas the rest of us sane individuals would end up developing our own separate "trusted circle of friends" who would automatically reject any email from people they didn't trust (i.e. the spammers). A "trusted" peer-to-peer email delivery network. It COULD work. Couldn't it? Or am I missing something here??
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
Fight Spam! Join CAUCE!
http://www.c
This COULD work...
I think some people are forgetting an important aspect of the MTA/PCA issue:
What's to stop people from becoming their *own* "trusted authority"?
I mean, why rely on someone ELSE -- some big ISP or "Certificate Authority" (Verisign, etc) -- to ultimately say who is trustworthy TO YOU and who isn't? Why not rely on YOURSELF? (or your trusted friends?)
From my reading of the paper *anyone* could ultimately become an "authority", determining who is and who is not allowed to send email to a given person (with the "given person" in this case being oneself).
Thus I can envision a sort of "peer-to-peer" email delivery network arising from this idea wherein everyone, over time, builds their own database of "trusted sources" that would be allowed to send them email (or rather, whose email a person would be willing to accept email FROM). A private "white list" if you will.
With this approach we each only accept email from individuals/organizations that WE OURSELVES trust, -or-, optionally (on an individual by individual basis), who are trusted by others whose judgement we ourselves trust.
The email delivery "network" would thus reduce to everyone/anyone participating in the delivery/authentication of email, ala the old "circle of friends" approach.
You want to send me email? Fine. Then you need to either be someone I personally know (and thus someone I myself trust; i.e. a friend) or else someone who knows someone I trust (i.e. a "friend of one of my friends"). If you're not one of those types of people, then I'm not interested in receiving your email. Full stop.
Each person could configure their own levels of trust (i.e. how far removed from their own close circle of friends someone could be and still be allowed to send you email).
The spammers would end up quickly developing their own "circle of friends", sending and delivering their spam amongst themselves (and/or amongst demented individuals who liked receiving such junk) whereas the rest of us sane individuals would end up developing our own separate "trusted circle of friends" who would automatically reject any email from people they didn't trust (i.e. the spammers).
A "trusted" peer-to-peer email delivery network.
It COULD work.
Couldn't it?
Or am I missing something here??
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
Fight Spam! Join CAUCE!
http://www.c
Can you please enlighten me? Is there a way to stop spam before I download it? So that it is not wasting my bandwidth?
Yes there is: in world with no open relays you can get rid of spam. Unfortunatlly that's not going to happen in this universe anytime soon.
This was exactly my worry. It starts off with a grand goal of "empowering end-users" then tells you that in order to be empowered you have to be certified but some big-brother organisation that decides who is to be trusted and who is not.
Doesn't sound like much of a way forward to me.
Regards,
Tim.
That's for sure. Everybody knows that Apache is the worst web server in the world, after all.</sarcasm>
Thawte has provided free personal certificates through this Web of Trust for more than 5 years. I know, because I'm a WOT notary.
I agree with the apathy of many of the posts on this thread. People like the idea of being annonymous on the Internet, but they don't like the consequences that go with it.
Spam is a consequence of the freedoms provided by annonymity. While it may be possible to construct a new mail exchange system that prevents mail of uncertain origin, such solutions will likely have a cost of reduced personal annonymity (aka certification of origin or identification of sender).
-mazor
Up with this I shall not put!
Clear, Dark Skies
the bottom line is the spammers, and they are few and far between, are very active on a per spammer basis and pay the big bucks. I suspect that a lot of the "open relays" aren't open because of negligence but are open to provide the owner with a degree of plausable denignablity, and the spammer is paying big bucks for a relatively throw away IP address to route his Emails through.
Maybe IP6 will help because it'll give enough IP address out so that dynamic IP's will become un-necessary. Many hosting companies allow user's to send Email that resolves to their domain name; our account at vario allowed this, how they had to set it up is
first you'd check your Emails stored on the pop server, which ran a script that opened the relay for one half an hour; with a static IP, they could limit the relay to IP addresses only from authorized IP addresses. IP's could even be reverse resolved so my address could be resolved to budgenator.isp.net so if I send out many complaint generating Emails, my address could be blacklisted instead of a whole block belonging to the isp.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
All I said is that every IP should have a reverse DNS entry and that your HELO information provide a FQDN which has a valid A record and/or MX record. I never said this had to _match_ the PTR and A records in DNS.
It probably wouldn't be a bad idea that if the FQDN given in the HELO command and that derived from doing a DNS lookup do not match to insert delays in the remainder of the transaction. Similarly if the domain in MAIL FROM is inconsistent with that from either a DNS lookup or the HELO command. Thus indicating that some form or relaying is likely to be going on.
The Internet is a place that everyone should be allowed to use right?
Well isn't the Internet based on a resource that has to be centrally assigned?? I'm talking about IP addresses(and AS#)
"Users" of IP addresses are required to register for their IPs from Regional Internet Registries(RIR) i.e. RIPE/ARIN/APNIC/LACNIC etc ...
<make-things-look-simple>
Strictly speaking, there is nothing that technically stops a "user" from using any IP address.
If you talk BGP to your ISP, well, you could technically pick up a free IP range and say it is yours, and the routers on the net will believe it.
</make-things-look-simple>
now lets get to the point! If e-mail has become so unusable as it is being claimed(don't get me wrong, I'm fed up myself with spam!), there is a simple solution:
All ISPs would be required to regiser authorised mail servers with the RIR(being it via some kind of whois, or using a DNSBL or rather DNS allow list) Obviously the mail servers should use authentication etc.
this doesn't require anything new technically, and servers listed would be a little more trusted. Administrators/users would than have the option to accept mail from anywhere, or accept only those "trusted"
miss use of the mail servers would then remove them from this list
ok 1 question to be answered, who defines what is misuse??!
dejV
I don't know about you guys, but I don't get a lot of spam, I get a lot of offers from people who "got my email address from one of their partners or affiliates". What I propose is "Who". Force mass-mailers to tell me who they got my email address from, so I can go to them & tell them QUIT SELLING MY FXXCKING NAME! And if they got my name from someone else, who? So on, and so on, and so on...
Most of the open relays are 'config errors', not intentional (mistakes or easier to 'open world' then 'open what I need'). A spammer is unlikely to open a relay for his competition to use.
The ability to block dynamic IP blocks exist today, most ISPs will not provide the blocking services the dynamic ranges, THIS may be, as you say, 'plausable deniability'. The ISPs claim they 'choose not to restrict their customers' (Yeah, have you READ a cable End User Service Agreement (EUSA) or even a dial-up ISP EUSA).
boycott may be
That's exactly what is proposed in Tripoli. A boycott of relays that don't use the Tripoli protocols. However, the boycott is (potentially) by the end user mail recipient. Any recipient is allowed to run their own relay and accept any message that they like - SMTP or Tripoli protocols. However, if the large majority of users (including ISPs) only accept the new, authenticated protocols, the number of spams received will drop dramatically and there will be no incentive to be a spammer.
Graham
Graham
I understand. BUT Tripoli, as I understand it, implies I boycott everyone that does not use Tripoli, I.E. I do not talk to people that do not update their mail servers. My point is that people do NOT update their mail servers and cuttng myself off from 90% of the net is not likely to work (I'd like to get the mail my bank, my doctor, my office, send me as ignoring it COULD be bad).
A boycott scheme that does NOT require people to change mailers (RBL type lists) works better as my doctor, bank and office do not have to update to Tripoli and are not likely (I hope) to make it to an RBL list. They make NO changes, I still get mail, I still get to boycott the 'bad guys'. A better more workable solution (IMHO) than forcing people to change mailers.
Problem is open relays and dynamic IPs make the list a rotating door of addresses and it becomes an arms race, spammers use the address before it gets listed, change addresses once it does, and play catch me if you can. This doesn't change with Tripoli, they install Tripoli, you get spam from that address, you block, they change addresses/installs (if you want global mail, you need a default permit on receiving mail from 'new' Tripoli installs). The only win is really open relays, once you list it all gets blocked, gee same as an RBL. Oh, OK instead of JUST changing IP addresses as in the current arms race, they need to reinstall Tripoli somewhere else, possibly under a different name. I'm afraid I do not see much advantage.