Spam.

[Bill Nash]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, George Toft wrote:

> The problem is in the content of the e-mail.  This is much like the
> highway.  We pay our licensing fee to the state (fee to the ISP), and we
> load up our car and drive (send e-mail).  How can you tell that the
> person in the car committed some crime (violated AUP)?  You can't, until
> someone else complains.  Make the roads toll-roads, like California's
> private highways (require SSL), and all you've done is slow down the
> system.

	Good points. In the case of a legitimate ISP or other hosting
business, a chunk of content in your AUP specifically prohibiting spam and
a no-nonsense attitude would go a long way to discouraging this kind of
behavior. What about a reserved right within your AUP stating violators of
the spam policy are subject to a nice fat 'service charge'? Again, hit
them in the wallet. My entire idea is focused on accountability and being
able to pin down the spam to a responsible party.

> Then there are the spam-friendly ISP's that cater to the spammers.  How
> do you block them?  Reject their Cert?  By what criteria?  A Realtime
> Black List?  Isn't that what we do now?

	That's pretty much the whole idea. Cert blocking can be done a la
carte by mail admins who deem certain servers as worthy. I think one thing
most people don't realize is that you don't HAVE to accept mail from other
servers if you don't want it. Packets and trust, again.

> What I see here is the opportunity to sell an e-mail server appliance.
> We used to have Linux Firewall's on a floppy (I know we still do), now
> we have little black box routers from D-Link and LinkSys.  What about a
> simple mail server appliance with a web GUI where you feed it your ISP's
> info, it filters your mail based on the ANTI-SPAM HOW-TO posted last
> week, and your mail client receives everything through it.  How much
> would you spend to avoid 99% of all spam?  $50?  $100?  Anyone think we
> can fit it on a single floppy?

	I think it'd be a fairly simple task to retool something like
Trinux to handle this.

- billn