Reviving the Finger Protocol to Fight Spam?

Greg asks: "Some will remember the finger protocol which is barely used now. Although this tool was useful in some case, today this tool would be a nice tool for spammers. However, could such be used against spam? Most spammer use bogus email, and most spam-fighters talk about changing SMTP is to implement a certificate system to make sure the sender is valid. While this is great, it'll require a complete re-write of the SMTP protocol, adoption and re-write of all software using SMTP. Wouldn't it be easier to use a 'finger'-like protocol? When receiving a mail we could check if the sender is valid or not. What people think about this?"

Comments

More RBL needed?

[secolactico]

Pretty soon somebody will set up a finger server that will simply respond to every query with a "valid user" response.

Then you'll have to blackhole those servers.

I think it's interesting, though useless.

[stienman]

A large portion of spam gets sent out under real email addresses that do not belong to the spammer.

On top of that fatal flaw, this system still has all the major problems of other systems:

Would require huge infrastructure and deployment efforts
Not everyone will get on board, either on the receiving end or sending end
Most email users do not control their own domains and would depend on their ISP for any finger servers
Most people still accept spam as a 'fact of life' concerning the internet.

Even now I still tell people that they will just have to accept the spam, though some filters help. It's simply not worth most people's time to fight it yet.

I wish we didn't have to use any legal measures, but the reality is that any technological measures will be overcome quickly. Laws exist to prevent such 'arms races', and in this case neither party (spammer/user) is willing to back down from their position.

-Adam

no.

[Drakon]

that's not a good solution. sorry. see above
I don't see why I can send mail from, for example, president@whitehouse.gov
This is ASTOUNDINGLY easy in UNIX systems
hostname whitehouse.gov
useradd -m president
su - president
mail -s 'How are you gentelmen???' ...

kids and spam..

[zcat_NZ]

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Re:SMTP needs to die!

[schon]

I always take the time to metnion that spam exists because SMTP is intrinsicly flawed to allow it.

And you're wrong.

Spam exists because the sociopaths that do it don't think they're doing anything wrong.

Spam is a social problem. It doesn't matter if SMTP is "intrinsically flawed" (which it isn't) or not - any system you can think of can be abused. Come up with a better solution, and I bet that I can come up with a way to spam through it in under 5 minutes. And if I can, you can bet that spammers can too.