FTC Chief Bashes Anti-Spam Bills

teutonic_leech writes "According to an MSNBC report FTC chairman Tim Muris has indicated that the antispam laws being considered by Congress 'just won't work and may even be counterproductive - some of the proposed laws could be harmful, or at best useless.' He further concluded that 'In the end, legislation cannot do much to solve the spam problem, because it can only make a limited contribution to the crucial problems of anonymity and cost shifting.'" Other spam bits: an anti-spam service has a funny interview with one of their users, and reader der.hans submits a story and some pretty pictures discussing the quantity of Sobig.f virus emails.

Comments

What is needed is a new email protocol

[mark-t]

But retaining backwards compatibility with SMTP would invariably allow spamming to continue.

An entirely new mail protocol probably still needs to be created though, but what I suggest is that mailservers which support the new protocol have a mechanism whereby, on a user by user basis, any SMTP-protocol mail coming in for users that have turned off SMTP could be rejected as soon as the header is finished. These mailservers would also be configured to automatically add a header for the users who don't reject the mail, maybe something like "X-Protocol: SMTP" so that they can have an idea whether or not they are still getting important stuff that way after the protocol has been around for a bit, and determine whether or not they should simply reject old SMTP from that point forward. Also, if the mailserver admin desires, *ALL* old SMTP protocol mail could be rejected this way, but presumably he wouldn't do that until he was confident that all the individual users were content with such a policy change. This sort of mechanism would give people the ability to slowly migrate to the new protocol, and in the interim, give people who wanted a quick and easy way to classify such emails by a specific email header that option.