EU Rolls out Anti Spam Strategy

An anonymous reader was one of several who noted an article about the latest developments in the EUs War on Spam. The article is pretty realistic in pointing out that EU Legislation won't be very effective unless Asia and the US do something as well.

Comments

Re:Well it goes something like this...

[Montreal Geek]

We need a new mail protocol, with proper digital signing and verification of authorithy (does 231.143.211.35 have permission to send mail using the domain name "hotmail.com"?)

Yes. And who do you give the keys to that system of yours? Who do you trust?

And I really mean trust. Trust that your "permission to send mail" will not be taken away by a competitor, or givernement, silencing you. Trust that the organisation managing this doesn't mishandle things technically. Trust that they cannot be financially "convince" to give that "permission" to phantom spammers.

Email works because it is unsecure. Sure, right now you get inordinate amounts of spam, but at least you cannot be silenced either.

Fix the cause, not the method or effect. There is spam today; lots of it. The cause of spam isn't the permissive mail system; it's naive pigeons who buy into the snakeoil that they sell.

If you lock mail down, spammers will cheat, lie and bribe their way into sending spam. But your ability to send mail may someday disapear.

Do you think corporate/governement whistleblowers (the Haloween memos come to mind) would still speak freely if the only way they could communicate suddenly needed digital signatures?

-- MG