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January 14, 2004
Spam Update
Posted by Arnold
Another story pointer from Lawrence Lee.
Yahoo's plan is to write open-source software for popular e-mail server programs such as QMail and SendMail that would check all incoming messages to ensure they're coming from real Internet domains.
I think that if we're going to monkey with Internet email, what we ought to do is try to find a way to only transmit email that is
either plain text
or sent to just one person. In that case, if you are an email sender, you can pick one of the following: send email in plain text to as many people as you want; or send email with HTML and attachments to one person at a time.
The thinking behind this approach is that plain text email does not carry viruses, puts a low strain on the system, and is more easily handled with spam filters. If we got rid of bulk email that includes non-text, then the costs of spam would go way down.
People who send out email newsletters and who want fancy formats would have to change their practices. They could put their formatted newsletters on the web and send their subscribers plain-text email with links to the web version. That seems to me to be not terribly costly.
Comments (2)
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1. Foolish Jordan on January 14, 2004 08:44 AM writes...
Let's say I'm Joe Spammer with my list of a million e-mail addresses, and I have a beautiful HTML ad for, whatever. And I also know that every mail server in the world rejects HTML mails that have more than one entry on the To: (Cc: and Bcc:) lines. Why don't I just reprogram my outgoing mail server to just copy my mail a million times, each time with exactly one entry in the To/Cc/Bcc lines? Each server receiving a copy of my mail has no idea whether it is a unique mail or just one of millions.
Permalink to Comment2. Chris Hanson on January 14, 2004 06:32 PM writes...
Anything that involves wide-scale filtering of Internet email to arbitrary standards (like "plain text" - plain text in what character encoding? ) is a non-starter.
Just as any scheme that involves billing the sender per-email is a non-starter.
About the only scheme I think could work is one where servers require the client to do some work (like prime number factorization) per message sent. Get this implemented in the widely-deployed Open Source mail servers as part of STMP AUTH, get the top client vendors to implement it, and then get service providers to start requiring it on behalf of clients.
Anything else - trying to arbitrarily restrict what gets sent, or trying to bill people for sending - simply won't fly with the majority of the people using email.
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