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The Anti-Spam Research Group's Plan for Spam
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."
"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."
This would more or less force spammers to send from their own domains... Or from ISP's that are spam friendly.
It might not STOP spam (though blacklisting would be easier), but it'd make it traceable...
Which would make it easier to file complaints under the anti spam laws.
Corporatism != Free Market
This new mechanism will help eliminate forged e-mail from-fields though, and allow for easier message filtering.
1. They were about things I gave a damn about
2. They were marked (like ADV:) for easy filtering
What bothers me about spam are the violations of those two. I don't want emails about printer toner, or bigger schlongs. And I don't like having ads clutter up my inbox, where email from people I know and such belongs.
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.
I have a real aversion to the idea of paying to send email of any type, so any method that is not in that vein is progress in my opinion.
I like the idea; the problem is getting uptake on it. You need to encourage a lot of people. The way to do this is to get the "big" ISPs in on the scheme immediately. Participants should alter their mail transfer programs to tag the SUBJECT line of the messages with the word Untrusted. This will cause receivers to know, and significant embarrassment for those not participating...which will cause their mail system to be upgraded to participating status.
Unless the bad effects of not participating are directly visible (as in subject line), it's gonna take too long.
Spam is now the enemy. It must be destroyed. Here comes the IETF to solve the problem.
SMTP Next Generation is on its way. The only question is the exact design. The general outline is already known. First, there will be real-world verification of identity tied to every account capable of sending SMTP NG e-mail. There will be a transition period where people can sign up for "upgraded" (NG) e-mail accounts; then, a period where these "upgraded" accounts can receive e-mail from other NG accounts as well as from old, potentially anonymous accounts. Business and government users will transition to NG.
Then, there will be an Internet-wide deadline, upon which all NG e-mail addresses will be unable to receive e-mail except from other NG addresses. All SMTP old generation traffic will be blocked. The old base of mail users will be forced to transition to SMTP NG. At this point, if there is ever a complaint about spam, the spammer can be tracked down and booted off Internet e-mail forever. As a result, spam will cease to exist.
The day the Internet died. Sure, it will be more "efficient" then. No spam. But it won't be free.
Don't cry about it. It happens to all technology. Those who need anonymous communications will just move to something else. Maybe web-based discussion, for example. Just no more truly private, truly anonymous, or truly free e-mail.
Coming soon to your neighborhood.
Great write-up on RMX, brought to you by the same guy who came up with an easy way to snapshot.
Spam is simply not profitable enough to last much longer. It is the last of a dying breed of pioneering Internet money-making schemes like the pyramid scheme emails and banner ads. Eventually the spammers will move on to other means of money making because their revenue is guaranteed to drop off as their tactics turn more and more people off.
Instead of fighting the good fight here, the best thing to do is let this dying ember peter out on its own. Forcing spammers to use more drastic tactics just results in them doing more harm in the long run. If there had been no resistance at all, we'd probably be seeing a much more mature and respectable online advertising industry instead of the random, haphazard, and very annoying multitude of spam king wannabes downloading their spam kits and setting up shop.
I have been pwned because my
Here's your fly in the soup:
/me sees domains like a cat walking on your keyboard being used as throw-away domain for spamming. (lkjshret.com IN RMX 0/0)
It only works when receiving mail with an forged and uncooperative sender-address. Nothing will prevent a spammer listing 0.0.0.0/0 as authorized sender addresses provided he controls the DNS for the envelope-sender.
It will increase the cost of a spam-run, and that's good news. On second thought: I like it.
The RMX record can return any IP addresses that it wants, the receiving machine just does a DNS lookup on the originating address and makes sure that IP is authorized to send mail. Read the RFC for more details.
We already know who some of the spammers are. Heck, some of them have admitted it! What we need is good old-fashioned mob justice. If we all have a hand in the lynching, how are the coppers supposed to know who exactly did the killing? I suggest that we rename Saturday Spamurday. Every Spamurday we all mob the home of a spammer and lynch them in a very public manner. Soon, the spam should start dropping off, because who would dare risk their lives to mob justice to make a few bucks selling penis enlargers?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Isn't this what the reply-to field is for?
You could also run your own SMTP server, unless you're on a modem at home or something.
The original discussion on Nanog can be found here or perhaps here. He originally had the proposal on his site (dead link) but he seems to have taken the page down, and I don't see any reference to him contributing to this draft.
No. The reply-to field is for directing replies to an address different from your own, not for indicating who sent the e-mail. Mailing list servers and private whitelists generally check against the From field.
Sure, I could - but Joe Average wouldn't know how to, nor should he have to.
A valid point, however sshing to your box back in your country of origin and sending email from there is usually a valid option; that's what I do when I travel.
Right now, part of the problem is that ISPs and users are bearing the cost of spam. In the end, any of the costs to the ISPs are passed on to their customers. Making us pay to send, is going to cut down on the usefulness of e-mail to legitimate users. If I have to pay by the message, I'm going to think twice about a quick note to a friend asking if he wants to meet for lunch. I'll pass along fewer cool URLs.
On the flip side, spammers will still send from addresses that can't be collected from. Many spammers are willing to harass people, steal the bandwidth they've paid for, and lie to people about everything from the return address on the e-mail to the fact that the opt-out procedure is actually just a verification that they have a live address. We won't even go into their claims about the efficacy of the products they sell. Is it even a stretch to believe that they will continue to lie to ISPs and defraud them of payments for the e-mail they send?
Micropayments for e-mail would kill it.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
This is a really weak argument to continue to allow anyone to impersonate me (well, to pretend to be allowed to send mail for my domain). There are two simple reasons why:
Basically, if you aren't happy with RMX, just find a different ISP (probably one that is spammer friendly, go figure) or set up your own domain. I like this solution because the market can decide whether or not it will be useful and user choice (in spam filters) can be preserved.
I hope we'll be able to add this useful tool to SpamAssassin soon.
(I agree with you entirely about "spam" already having a perfectly good definition: UBE. I suspect their weasel-words are due to the influence of the DMA and their allies who claim that spam is only a problem because of fraud and scams. No, spam is a problem because I'm being flooded by UBE. I don't care if it's fraudulent or not.)
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.
But here's the fun part: As a recipient, each user sets up their account with a "deposit price" for bypassing the whitelist. You can set that price to any amount in your currency of choice. As a sender, you can set the maximum amount that you're willing to pay, so that you don't suddenly get billed/debited/charged some outrageous fee. If someone who is not on your whitelist needs to send you an email, they pay a deposit. When you receive the email, you either accept it or reject it. If you accept it, you do not get paid; the sender keeps the deposit. If you reject it (meaning you've read the email and decided it was spam), the deposit paid by the sender is paid to you. It's enough to set the deposit to something like 50 cents. You'll probably get highly targeted emails at this price. I wouldn't mind risking 50 cents to send someone an email that I think they'll accept. You could set it to a few dollars to reduce the noise even further. But you could set it to any price you want. If you REALLY don't want email from sources not included in your whitelist, you could set the deposit to thousands of dollars. With this system, you'll be HAPPY to receive spam! And spammers either won't be able to afford it, or recipients will start making some money.
You can setup an SSL-Authenicating posting SMTP server that allows relaying from you. It being authenicating means it only works from your laptop. Its also a good thing TM, cos it will queue any messages for you, so you can disconnect from the network and it will worry about delayed messages.
James
Any server that has a RMX record, should also have a compulsory, authenticated way of sending email from an unauthorized address. For instance, I'm now at home, and I would like to send mail with my University address. I can not do that, because the University blocks relaying from external IPs. So I send mail with my ISP account, but with the headers of my University account. If my University implemented a RMX record, I could no longer to that. And unless I can authenticate with the University servers to send mail through them, I can't send mail with my own mail address on it! If I can authenticate and send with my Uni account then it is fine, if not this will cause a big stink and RBX being dropped. Really.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I prefer the term, "unsolicited comercial email", but I see where you are comming from. UCE is the most obvious and obnoxious form. Bulk mailing by organizations you belong to may not be solicited but have legitimate uses. Either way, everyone knows what spam is when they see it, but there's little hope of building a useful filter based on "consent". The simple answer, to copy fax laws against unsolicited comercial faxes, is the best way to kill spam.
These IRTF people have other problems too. They've been hard at work with DRM and seem to give their End to End group the cold shoulder. Also their E2E projects included multicasting and other push like stuff. Everywhere I look, I see things I don't like, adding inteligence to a network that works because it has none. Who's putting these people up to this stuff?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Your "home ISP", or more in particular, your "e-mail ISP" should provide you secure reception and sending of e-mail. That is, they should allow POP or IMAP over SSL to download mail, and use SMTP AUTH over SSL (either STARTTLS or smtps). That way you are always sending and receiving via your "e-mail isp".
The reason most people use "local" mail servers when they dial in is because lots of dial ins block outgoing to port 25 to stop spam. A band-aid on top of a band-aid. Use a secure, authenticated channel for your e-mail and you both add security to your own e-mail, and help stop spam.
The RMX approach is certainly very interesting. Although not based on DNS I had previously asked an AOL postmaster for similar information about what servers could legitimately send mail from any aol.com domains. That simple step has allowed me to block almost 100% of all spam reporting to come from joerandomuser@aol.com. I've been looking for similar information from the other big ISPs that spammers love to forge but with little luck.
Of course there may be a few things that this breaks (not that they shouldn't be fixed to work a different way). One is email intermediaries. SMTP was originally designed to be store and forward, and it used to be quite common that mail took many sometimes unpredictable hops along its way...direct end-to-end connections were not nearly as unbiqutious as they are now. But there still are cases where an SMTP intermediate hop may exist for legitimate reasons, but which may be unknown to the sender; thus they would not be listed in the RMX access list.
Another "questionable" practice that would be affected are services like monster.com, which send mail (usually resumes) to subscribers (companies hunting employees), but forge the sender address as being the real address of the individual, not of monster.com itself. Thus monster.com forges mail from almost any domain all the time; even though that mail can hardly be described as "spam" since the individual being forged has authorized monster to do it, and the recipient is paying monster to recieve them... But that kind of practice would still be affected without some workaround.
Oh, and if you want end-to-end authentication why don't more SMTP servers use the STARTTLS (aka SSL) mechanism with REAL certificates just like web servers do? If this became standard practice then it would be much easier to do SMTP server authentication with existing technology, and in a way that is completely transparent to the users (MTAs).No mention is made of legitimate uses that are also killed.
But that isn't a problem, either!
1) You can use an IMAP mail server. (which gives you lots of features, anyway)
2) You can use authenticated SMTP.
3) then, there's SMTP after POP.
4) You can use webmail thru your ISP (or on your mailserver)
5) You can have a "from" address and a "reply-to" address - they don't have to be different!
I mean, it's an inconvenience like open relays are an inconvenience!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There are ways to have email with the same level of anonymity that we have today without requiring some kind of authoritarian system. The most promising is the use of sender-verification. Rather then having some big brother type system setup, you have individual mail clients verify senders by replying to them and asking them to validate their humanity.
As long as it's a real person with a real email address sending the info, it should get through.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
How about good old-fashioned shunning. Spammers should not be welcome anywhere. Anywhere you have to right to turn them away, you should. Tell their neighbors who they are and what they do. Send them a thoughtful letter explaining why you disapprove. Include copies of every page from several anti-spam web sites. Cut them off in check out lines in grocery stores. Get their cars towed immediately when their parking meters expire. When choosing a fake e-mail address when posting to Usenet, use one that belongs to a spammer.
The spam issue has some interesting parallels in the models of the new economy. Just like in other industries like healthcare and pharmacuticals, the major players are not interested in a "cure". That's not profitable for them. A more appealing approach for them is some method of "treatment", preferably something that obligates the user to continually do business with them in perpetuity in order to maintain their spam-free condition.
Efforts to regulate the content of spam messages, inconsequential civil penalties, client side filtering, and any system which filters mail based on content caters to this impotent approach to addressing the spam problem. It offers no cure. It does nothing to reduce spam; it does nothing to discourage spammers; it does nothing to address the most serious problem of spam, which involves unfair and often illegal exploitation of resources.
Maybe this is the new way. We don't actually solve any problems. We just put bandaids on them and allow them to consume more wasted resources, and the demand for more resources, hardware and bandwith is what drives the new economy.
Call me idealistic, but I think it sucks. I am appalled that so many people will settle for such shallow and ineffective approaches to these problems. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most of these people profit from the existence of spam so why bite the hand that feeds them on a major artery when you can collect some bucks and merely trim their nails?
The internet started on a model of trust. We know we can't trust the spammers and we knock ourselves out trying to implement that distrust. All the while we operate in a manner the spammers can fully trust: if a system says it's an open relay it really is, if a system is secured against being an open relay it proudly proclaims as much. We're just as honest about open proxies. We assist the spammers thousands of times a day by being trustworthy. Isn't that exactly why why they find it so easy to commit abuse? We keep being honest and trustworthy with the spammers - we help them. Stop doing things that lead to our being hurt, start doing things that hurt the spammers. It's an easy and logical progression to make.
It's time to destroy the spammers' trust in us. This should have no impact on anything legitimate: it's targeted on the spammers. Those who never go looking for open relays will never be deceived by fakes - it's only the spammers who fall victim to the deceit. Same for open proxies - who goes looking for them other than abusers? Doesn't that seem to be exactly right - harm those who would do harm, don't touch the rest? There are behaviors that only spammers exhibit. Target those, make life miserable for the spammers.
The ASRG methods, all of them, are designed to be the same for everyone - they are targeted on what spammers and non-spammers do in common and then are supposed to make use by the non-spammers impossible. To do that everything will have to be changed. That will take years and it will take nearly full compliance to be effective. It will be like the "secure open relays" campaign of a few years ago. To actually stop spam that had to be universal, or very nearly so. Instead there are still hundreds of thousands of open relays, more pop up every day. How many years for full compliance? Alternately there may have to be a D-day for a total switchover - a source of huge complexity and disruption. Before commiting to that isn't it necessary to make sure there is not something less drastic which will work to end spam?
If instead people opposed to spam change their behavior toward the things spammers and only spammers do then ordinary email can be left as it is - if those behavior changes end spam. Foremost of the behavior changes would be stop ignoring spammer abuse. Spammer abuse is an easy target, an easy path to hitting spammers and completely missing non-spammers. Spammers have two choices: spam direct or spam via abuse. If you knock down spam via abuse then they're left with direct spam. That you can hit adequately using blocklists. ASRG wants to make spam impossible by making every single spam message imposible. That's overkill - it's only necessary to make spam cost more than it returns. That can be done - without a total reengineering of the system.
The big question is: are anti-spammers smart enough to stop spammers by going after the abuse? I say they are, when you include in "anti-spammers" all the people that do not like spam. The alternative position would seem to be that anti-spammers are smart enough to stop spam by changing the entire internet but not by doing anything lesser. I can't agree to that - not unless those limited-intelligence people explain why that is. Isn't there the roots of a paradox in that?
There are several good scenarios which depend upon the way the SMTP system works currently that will break as a result of a change like this.
:P
What do we do for the millions and millions of users who currently send mail via older software from their home system, tell them that they are screwed out of sending email? The beauty of SMTP is that it works. Assuming that this change is implemented, it will probably cause millions of users pain, and those users won't put up with it.
Once those users switch to a different email system, say for example, Microsoft Exchange. The damage to SMTP will be complete. Then again, what am I saying... I have stock in M$... Bring it on.
Seriously, though. Filtering is the responsibility of the client, not the server. Why do we need to impose new rules, which are just as easy to fake, rather than working on making the system work better for the user.
Most of the SPAM that comes to my site is currently of the SPAM@Home variety, i.e. the same message comes from hundreds or thousands of compromised hosts, from thousands of different addresses, to thousands of my users. As far as I can tell, rMX won't have any effect on these distributed SPAM networks.
:w
My organization has roughly 120 Internet email users and a quick grep -c of the logs reveals that in the last week my server has denied 700 messages from open relays or known sources of UCE. In spite of this I have to wade through around ten spam emails each morning before I can get to work and I regularly get questioned by vice presidents and the CEO about why I'm "not blocking pornographic emails". RMX, micropayments, filtering, and other solutions may not be ideal. They may, to some degree, restrict free speech. They could require extra effort on the part of legitimate senders or admins of spam-unfriendly ISPs. It's possible that such schemes may do away with Internet email as we know it... but after deleting the fourth email this week (each from different network) containing an animated GIF of a woman sucking a horse's penis I don't give a crap. The problem has to be dealt with and if that means that you have to change email clients, switch to a email service that supports authentication, use a web-based service when traveling, update your DNS records, or close your open relay that is fine by me.
My article for building this got denied last night so I'll post it here instead. To create a list of authenticated users automatically that allows people to enter their address etc.. via a web form (much like Spam Arrest visit this how-to. It requires only a web server, php interpreter and Mercury e-mail server.
Micropayments are a tax on speech
Oh come on... do you complain about your telephone bill in the same way?
I disagree. The Internet was founded on exactly the opposite. The whole distributed computing concept was bourne out of a distrust for any single node being too important.
In effect, on the Internet, nothing is trusted.
The reason we have a spamming problem is not because the net is too trusting by design. It's because the medium is largely unregulated and transgressions therein are unenforced, so spammers operate with little fear of consequences.
In no other medium can you exploit other peoples' resources like you can on the Internet, and there are plenty of laws already, both criminal and civil that address these transgressions, but unlike other mediums, there is no agency or organized force in place to do something about it.
Here are some ideas I came up with that build on RMX to help prevent, and prosecute spam.
The first involves anonymous domain names. The author of the draft suggests simply not accepting mail from annon domains. I don't know if I really like this idea. A better system might be a RTBL type list of anon domains known to vouch for spam. That way someone could get a domain name without giving up personal info, and still be able to send mail.
Another usefull feature would be to sue non-forging spammers. Everyone could upload their spams to a group server. Since most states have laws that allow you to sue spammers for small amounts of money per message, once enough are collected from a single domain a lawsuit with enough of a financial incentive to actualy go through could be undertaken.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Most mass mailing worms send infected email with forged sender address. This technique seems can stop large number of these emails too (except when the domain of the forged address is the same as the domain of the real one). This reduces the number of complaints against the wrong person of sending virus.
"the ASRG wants to provide administrators and users the tools necessary"
;-)
Are they going to e-mail everyone with an offer to sign up? Oops!
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Slashdot is for geeks so I guess a technical solution to spam seems logical. However, is fixing this legally really that hard? First, it is a problem that has governments and corporations and users - in fact everyone except the spammers - are all on one side. It should be possible to get an international agreement to ban spam in this case. International agreements can/do work if they have support and they are realistic (for example banning CFCs worked). So the support is there - is it realistic? One of the things this group avoided is to try to define spam. But why do you need to have a precise definition? Something simple should work like:
For any mass email that is sent, the sender must be able to prove that the receieve gave his/her permission. Certain standards could be set here (eg. this permission must be opt-in for example). All bulk email must contain the details of the sending company and the option to ask said company to remove your details. Any company violating any of these rules or *aiding* a company to conceal this information (eg running an open gateway) should be fined heavily. Any country not signing up should be suject to sanctions (eg they cannot receieve international internet access or IT services from any signing country until they enforce these laws).
Now there are probably places where suggesting like this could be refined - but why is a legal solution to this problem such a wrong idea in general?!
Whatever. His basic statement is to ditch your existing email, get a new one, get a couple of others for misc purposes, and never give out your email address.
:).
Go Hide.
Bad answer to spam my friend. And frankly, it IS bullshit. I have had my email since 1992. It is me @ my domain. I absolutely possitively REFUSE to give it up.
IT IS MINE.
I won't jump through hoops and do this and that for the spammers to hide from them. I also just happen to have hundreds of spam trap addresses and they silently eat the spam and block the IP subnets. No questions asked. Hoops like this I'll jump through -- because logically it is more fun than "just hit delete". I personally like a good challenge.
The only way to get unblocked is a phone call to me. I have been doing it this way for a while (years) and have gotten now four (4) such calls across a half a dozen domains I manage. I see maybe 1 spam a week now.
There are, however, THOUSANDS of attempts daily and ~100 new subnets being added daily (recently). Shortly I'll have ALL the dialup & dsl lines identified across the entire Internet. Sad really.
I personally like the RMX record setup myself. I've always questioned why it isn't like this already. Can the spammers themselves properly setup a mail server and spam away? Sure. I can also block them that much easier. It's going to be a LOT harder for them to move around all the time. Hi-jacking dialup's and just using them will no longer work (and this has been their #1 method to date). The #2 method, hi-jacking mail servers themselves, will continue, but their numbers are limited (if not already all blocked
This won't mean one more bit of work for the end dialup user moving from ISP to ISP (legit). It will mean another configuration for the domains, but if it works as planned? Problem seriously cut back if not solved.
Say I run a small Linux server on my DSL line. I have a friend give me a DNS entry off of his domain, as I have a static IP on my server. I now have a DNS which can receive emails, only that it won't reverse DNS the same because my ISP owns the IP address block. I can't send emails now from my server because nobody reverse authenticates me.
Incorrect.. you isp does reverse authenticate it's IP address still. Feel free to "host yourip" and you'll get your reverse ptr domain. To see how this works I wrote in detail to another slashdot user who wanted to know. Here is the post you might want to read.. oddly enough it was only 2 weeks or so ago that again I was talking about this.
Say that I am a student on a university campus, which for some reason won't allow SMTP sending from outside the network as inside the network. This is as it should be, right? But it does allow POP. My computer is on the campus network and configured with whatever mail client it uses. Then suddenly, I'm on spring break, and I bring my laptop home to my families DSL/WiFi network. I can still download my mail, but since I'm off campus network, I can't be authenticated as myself to the mail server. No problem. My ISP lets me send mail with their mail server. Oh wait, new restrictions prevent me from sending this email.
This one doesn't even make sense. That situation has nothing to do with this new system we are speaking. You're problem could of been easily fixed with SMTP-AUTH if you're talking about what I think you're talking about or IMAP or something along those lines. That is just too confusing to even decipher.
The rest of it is you just trolling... right? If not you really should search google for smtp-auth, pgp mail and then search for challenge mail systems.
Making the sender be authenticated by DNS is a bad idea. I can spoof any IP I want to with the right TCP/IP packets.
?? So you're going to spoof an IP and then hack the dns server wherever the ip belongs to, to reverse to a valid domain?
Heh, no offense, but you're making absolutely no sense. Haven't provided any scenarios and the protocol you speak of just simply doesn't make sense.. This whole post just doesn't make sense. Is it the chewbacca defense?