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The Anti-Spam Research Group's Plan for Spam

Posted by michael on from the bit-bucket dept.

egoff writes "Speaking of standards, the ASRG, a member of the IETF, has a plan for "consent-based communications." Among the suggestions, according to Internet Week, are authentication services for falsified addresses, trusted senders, reputation systems (karma?), opt-out tools, best practices for challenge/response, and even a proposal for micropayments on unwanted mail. Instead of defining spam, the ASRG wants to provide administrators and users the tools necessary to avoid what they consider to be unwanted. One of the tools, Reverse MX, is expected to be in place in several months. It would allow the receiving mail server to query a domain to determine if the sending server is allowed to send on its behalf."

4 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Re:inevitable by bobbozzo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Just no more truly private, truly anonymous, or truly free e-mail.

    E-Mail isn't anonymous, and never has been, (your IP is traceable back to you) unless you use an anonymous remailer.

    If SMTP2 or whatever is successfull, then people will make anonymous remailers for it.

    --
    Nothing to see here; Move along.
  2. Re:Cooperate and I'll Read by Eggplant62 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    But if I could filter it all into an "Ads" mailbox, just like I have mailboxes for various mailing lists, I would scan the offers about stuff I might actually want. I'd be much more inclined to "click through" then, while my all-time number of click-throughs of spam email to date totals 0.
    Why not just be honest. Didn't you really mean to say /dev/null? Ads mailbox my ass. IF I WANT IT IN MY MAILBOX, I'LL SIGN UP TO IT. OTHERWISE, KEEP THE FUCK OUT. Marketers don't realize that I'll allow free access to friends, relatives and anyone else I've had an existing business relationship with. All others can pay ME to use it or subsidize my ridiculously expensive internet bill, which their current efforts are what keeps it so friggin' high in the first place.

    Christ, who do you think is paying for any of this shit? US!!
  3. Hidden Features by Voivod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mail agents like Mozilla will have to become more sophisticated about what mail relays they use when sending mail. Suddenly it's not okay to send both your personal e-mail and your work-from-home e-mail through your DSL ISP's mail server since your work domain DNS will claim no relationship with your DSL ISP's server.

    Could Mozilla use RMX to determine on the fly what relay to use? It sees that you're sending from a @slashdot.org address, so it does an RMX lookup on slashdot.org and discovers the IP of all the relays for that address. Ah, a nice clean new standard... the desire to abuse it is overwhelming. :-)

    An ironic side effect is that mail administrators are going to have to open up more holes in their relays. Your users can't just bounce mail off their random ISPs anymore. They have to use the real corporate mailserver now, which means you can't just lock things down by IP address such that only internal corporate users can use the relay.

  4. Re:THAT would be very useful... by keli · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... but how would you tell the difference? And you would still be able to use your email address as an identifier from anywhere, provided that you use the correct mail server.

    It would also be very convenient if you could change the caller-ID of the phone you are dialling from to your home phone number, when dialling from a friend's house or from work...