Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo and Unilateral Anti-Spam Technology?
EatenByAGrue asks: "According to this Business Week article, Yahoo is planning on distributing a toolkit for Sendmail and other mail daemons that adds an encrypted source domain key to email headers to verify where they came from. However, critics are concerned that the scheme will be easily bypassed and that it ignores standards bodies. What does the Slashdot community (representing countless email admins, I'm sure) think of this proposal? On one hand, its a commercial enterprise dictating standard technology, on the other hand, the standards bodies have proven themselves helpless and hopeless when it comes to providing solutions."
The problem, however, is that an economic solution will take away the very freedom and openness that made e-mail such a great communication medium. I have seen several proposals for economic solutions to the spam problem and don't like any of them. It's not because I can't afford the penny an e-mail or whatever it is that a given plan wants to charge, it's more of an ideological thing. Associating any sort of cost with e-mail will change the fundamental nature of what e-mail is, and I think there are many people who don't want to see that happen. I'm not entirely convinced that a technical solution is impossible, so I'd much rather pursue that avenue before we start looking at economic or social solutions. There are some very promising technical solutions out there.