spam control again

[ron.peterson at yellowbank.com]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 08:23:38AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> You brought up some things yesterday. One thought I had was to require
> every email message to have a valid digital signature. (Personally I
> prefer using OpenPGP, but there are other valid methods). With a digital
> signature much of the SPAM could be blocked early in the chain. And,
> those legitimate vendors could still send out bulk email. 
> The downside of this is that just about every email client would need to
> verify and produce a digital signature. We already have the standards
> for this in place and most email clients have the capability built in or
> available as plugins. 

A different approach, with the same goals, would be to use something
like hashcash.  Same problem, though: there are certain expectations
that are unlikely to be universally met.

http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/

I think it will be difficult to implement a technological solution to
the problem using current email standards.  One of the problems is that
SMTP itself makes it difficult to cryptographically protect header
information.

http://www.silkroad.com/papers/html/bomb/node13.html

I think there's a technological solution, but I'm not expecting the
solution to build upon the current SMTP infrastructure.

-- 
Ron Peterson                   -o)
87 Taylor Street               /\\
Granby, MA  01033             _\_v
https://www.yellowbank.com/   ----