View Full Version : Bill Gates wnts to charge per email
Ghosthunter
03-05-04, 12:56 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/05/spam.charge.ap/index.html
Good or bad idea?
In some ways I think it will help stop spam, but in other ways i think it will cause more problems then solve.
Ooooooooooh boy, they better not do that!
Get spam protection or something, we already pay for internet, why should we have to pay for email too?!!!
Crazy ****ing idea!!!
Well, money would be anyways - 10 seconds of math puzzle would be fine, I guess.
Seems more like an excuse to stop working on anti-spam features. I respect Bill Gates bigtime, but its in most cases his product that is getting hammered with spam. He needs to find a fix.
Originally posted by Roody
Seems more like an excuse to stop working on anti-spam features. I respect Bill Gates bigtime, but its in most cases his product that is getting hammered with spam. He needs to find a fix.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean by his product getting hammered by spam, I didn't understand that at all.
Originally posted by Snuf
Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean by his product getting hammered by spam, I didn't understand that at all.
Outlook and Outlook Express are bigtime targets to people due to the size of the market for them. Simply put they are the end all and be all of email programs for these reasons. With the market cornered like that they need to continue developing a product that will do a better job clamping down on spam.
Prey521
03-05-04, 01:50 PM
Originally posted by Snuf
Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean by his product getting hammered by spam, I didn't understand that at all.
Anything ending in @hotmail.com is pummeled with spam! :mad:
Originally posted by Prey521
Anything ending in @hotmail.com is pummeled with spam! :mad:
Good call Prey.
Ghosthunter
03-05-04, 01:58 PM
Originally posted by Prey521
Anything ending in @hotmail.com is pummeled with spam! :mad:
yeah but so is yahoo.com
Originally posted by Ghosthunter
yeah but so is yahoo.com
This thread is about Bill Gates though isnt it? I dont believe Prey suggested that Yahoo wasn't. Simply responding to your thread. :)
YeOldeStonecat
03-05-04, 02:02 PM
I don't see what Microsoft products have to do with spam at all! Yes Outlook and Outlook Express, with their .*ab files for address books, get targeted by worms and what not. But spam....that has nothing to do with what e-mail client you use, or e-mail server you use.
mnosteele52
03-05-04, 02:04 PM
I'm sick of hearing about "thier" ideas to stop SPAM. The only way to stop it is at the root of the problem..... go after the spammers. All the money that is spent on the bandwidth lost due to SPAM should be invested in tracking down spammers and fining them or giving them jail time, worldwide that is.
:irate:
Originally posted by YeOldeStonecat
I don't see what Microsoft products have to do with spam at all! Yes Outlook and Outlook Express, with their .*ab files for address books, get targeted by worms and what not. But spam....that has nothing to do with what e-mail client you use, or e-mail server you use.
The beef is with Microsoft's total inability to create something more effective to help prevent spam or at least lessen it. They make it a point to sell their software as a business software and spam is a legitimate concern. God knows I think Microsoft in general is a great company and Bill Gates is as brilliant as they come in some ways, but they need to improve on this.
Ghosthunter
03-05-04, 02:16 PM
Originally posted by Z.T.P.
This thread is about Bill Gates though isnt it? I dont believe Prey suggested that Yahoo wasn't. Simply responding to your thread. :)
no it about bill gates controlloing spam not if only use hotmail.
I get tons of spam in my yahoo, and my road runner email, what does that have to do with microsoft? I dont even use outlook
Viruses are another story but we are talking about spam
Originally posted by Ghosthunter
no it about bill gates controlloing spam not if only use hotmail.
I get tons of spam in my yahoo, and my road runner email, what does that have to do with microsoft? I dont even use outlook
Viruses are another story but we are talking about spam
I think the point is that Microsoft needs to do a better job. This is of course your thread GH, but I personally never saw anything in here that suggested this was anything other then Bill Gates and Microsoft's response to spam. Anyway, its your thread so if you wanna add to it. :)
Ghosthunter
03-05-04, 02:33 PM
Originally posted by mnosteele52
I'm sick of hearing about "thier" ideas to stop SPAM. The only way to stop it is at the root of the problem..... go after the spammers. All the money that is spent on the bandwidth lost due to SPAM should be invested in tracking down spammers and fining them or giving them jail time, worldwide that is.
:irate:
agree with going after them but dont it cost more money in the end to do that?
why not find a better way to prevent it?
YeOldeStonecat
03-05-04, 02:41 PM
Originally posted by Roody
The beef is with Microsoft's total inability to create something more effective to help prevent spam or at least lessen it. They make it a point to sell their software as a business software and spam is a legitimate concern. God knows I think Microsoft in general is a great company and Bill Gates is as brilliant as they come in some ways, but they need to improve on this.
Yeah but Microsoft has pretty much nothing to do with e-mail servers, DNS, and management of the above. Much as Bill would love to dominate e-mail and the internet too....Microsofts Exchange server is more about internal corporate e-mail, they're not about POP3 mail.
You sign up with some ISP, now except for MSN, the sum of all other ISP's is immensely larger than MSN, and how you get spam is a function of many other things....which are not related to Microsoft in any way.
Your websurfing habits...how you fill out forms online, how you advertise your e-mail, if you post your e-mail on websites, who/what/where you give your e-mail address to, what kind of stuff you sign up for with your e-mail address, who else posts your e-mail address on porn sites as a practical joke so you get tons of XXX spam mail, etc etc.
Most ISP's run their mail servers on *nix or I-Mail or some other non-Microsoft product. I see it as a bonus feature of ISP's to filter out their mail servers, have reverse-DNS setup to refuse mail from those not authenticated through it, have spam filters wrapped around their mail servers. That way their clients are relatively spam free.
I don't see how Microsoft could possibly do anything about it. Unless everyone has their e-mail hosted by Microsoft so that Microsoft could run the mail through their filters.
he and many others have felt this way for a long time.
scary because hackers will find a way around it, while honest people pay.
You make a valid point man. No doubt many people have to be involved to stop this sorta thing and one thing that needs to be done is tighter international laws regarding spam.
With the market cornered like that they need to continue developing a product that will do a better job clamping down on spam.
The mail client itself (outlook, ouloook express, eudora, courier, the bat, etc) has nothing whatsoever to do with spam or the amount of spam that is received.
It is NOT the task of the mail client to handle spam. The task of a mail client is to send and receive email messages.
There are mail clients that can use rulesets, plugin filters and addon anti-spam and anti-virus programs. Rulesets, plugins etc do little to combat spam because ALL of them at best can only do a 99% job. In other words some good email is lost and some spam gets through.
It is NOT the job of MS to create a mail client that eliminates spam. The ONLY thing that will eliminate spam is to make it uneconomical for spammers to send spam. This is achieved by several means:
1. Have an email system wherby the only mail that can be received by teh client requires that someone manually send the message to the recipient..
2. Fine spammers who illegally spam.
3. Use an anti-spam system that works 100%.
www.accuspam.com
4. Use an anti-spam system that is based on combinations of anti-spam methods. www.accuspam.com/accuspam.php (see table mid page)
MS had announced that they are tackling the spam problem. They will achieve some of their goals, but they will not make a mail client that handles spam. It is NOT economical for them to do so, plus it's impossible to do because spammers continually resort to new methods of spamming. All of these recent email worms in past few years have TWO MAIN PURPOSEs and that is "to disrupt communication channels" and "to harvest valid email addresses".
Ill admit Tony Im confused by that. If Accuspam can make a 100% gauranteed filter then why can't a company like Microsoft?
I don't see how Microsoft could possibly do anything about it. Unless everyone has their e-mail hosted by Microsoft so that Microsoft could run the mail through their filters.
MS is involved now in the attempt to combat spam. Their brightest contribution som far was suggesting a change to the pop3, smtp and imap protocols. These protocols are pretty old and date back to the earliest days of the www, and even earlier.
What was suggested was that a couple new fields be added to email headers, one of which is a unique id that cannot be forged and can be authenticated easily by mail servers. But changing an existing protocol takes a lot to get done. It can start on a few networks such as msn or aol, and eventually migrate to the rest of the www. But this requires the W3C to actually approve standards. And then getting isps and networks to comply with the new protocols.
This costs big money to create, establish and implement. But the economics of spamm are catching up in that presently over 60-70% of all email sent worldwide is now spam. A company with a 99% success anti-spam system in place will still lose quite a few thousand dollars/year because of spam, this in wasted work time alone.
Ill admit Tony Im confused by that. If Accuspam can make a 100% gauranteed filter then why can't a company like Microsoft?
You eveidently did not read accuspam. It's not a filter. Anyone can make a filter. A filter is just "allow this and disallow that". The key is detecting & identifying spam to begin with along with making it uneconomical for the spammer at the same time.
MS has no reason to create such an anti-spam system, they are software manufacturers. Such systems must run on servers and MS is not in the hosting business nor are they in the isp business. (except for msn) But MSN has it's own type of spam that really isn't spam.
Spam = UBE = Unauthorized Bulk Email. When one signs up for hotmail, msn or yahoo, one agrees that one will receive adverts in email. This may be unwanted but it's not spam by definition.
YARDofSTUF
03-05-04, 03:44 PM
Originally posted by Roody
The beef is with Microsoft's total inability to create something more effective to help prevent spam or at least lessen it. They make it a point to sell their software as a business software and spam is a legitimate concern. God knows I think Microsoft in general is a great company and Bill Gates is as brilliant as they come in some ways, but they need to improve on this.
keep ur email private and u wont get a ton of spam.
I like the 10 sec wait thing.
stevebakh
03-05-04, 03:56 PM
I think introducing fees is a terrible idea, personally.
A couple of things need to start happening. ISPs need to be forced to ensure they don't leave relays open to abuse... they comply or they are fined - simply because spam is costing companies and businesses money and disruption whilst annoying the average joe with an email address.
They need to change the law in the US to make spam illegal (as has happened recently within Europe, although most of our spam still comes from the US) :rolleyes:
When both of these things are implemented - spam will be reduced immensly.
I read about a software, a short time ago, where you leave it running and it dummies an open relay to trick spammers into using that - the data is nulled. Sounds interesting and worth a look:
http://www.spamhole.net/
YARDofSTUF has it right though... my hotmail account was blasted with spam. My personal ISP email address receives no spam at all. :)
Blisster
03-05-04, 04:07 PM
Originally posted by Roody
Good call Prey.
I don't get one shred of spam to my hotmail address
Originally posted by zooner
he and many others have felt this way for a long time.
scary because hackers will find a way around it, while honest people pay.
My friends and I are developing our own new email server/client architecture, we use it amongst ourselves and if this charge per email thing ever goes through you can be assured new protocols will emerge, nobody HAS to use standard email protocol.
Standard email is already so insecure also, with current email protocol I could send you an email from "billgates@microsoft.com" right now if I wanted, servers require no authentication, and the protocol has no way to deal with unwanted mass emails.
Our protocol allows end users to report unwanted email from a particular address(es) to the source server which alerts the admin once it reaches a certain sent email to complaint ratio.
Kyler1
Some servers (communigate, sendmail [if you want to dig through the hellish config], and others) will allow you to force client auth or the mail doesn't go through. I wish more ISPs would enact that.
Originally posted by TonyT
You eveidently did not read accuspam. It's not a filter. Anyone can make a filter. A filter is just "allow this and disallow that". The key is detecting & identifying spam to begin with along with making it uneconomical for the spammer at the same time.
MS has no reason to create such an anti-spam system, they are software manufacturers. Such systems must run on servers and MS is not in the hosting business nor are they in the isp business. (except for msn) But MSN has it's own type of spam that really isn't spam.
Spam = UBE = Unauthorized Bulk Email. When one signs up for hotmail, msn or yahoo, one agrees that one will receive adverts in email. This may be unwanted but it's not spam by definition.
I read it just used a poor choice of words.
I read it just used a poor choice of words.
fair enough.
Doesn't surprise me one bit.
It's just a way to make money off something that is already free.
Next thing you know they'll be charging you internet fees on a 'per hop basis'.
Telemarketer companies have to pay for long distance phone calls, but that doesn'tstop them.
I agree it would help, but it sounds suspiciously like a well-intentioned-sounding excuse to start charging for something.
They've already started charging for checking your email on your cell phone (unlike yahoo), and they're trying to move a hotmail over to a pay format, by shuttng down the free accounts after 30 days, limiting storage, etc.
stevebakh
03-06-04, 04:18 AM
They won't implement this fully unless they get some kind of agreement among all the major vendors that they will follow suite.
It's just a way to make money off something that is already free.
Well - when you have companies charging for tap water, it doesn't really seem so outrageous does it? :rotfl:
Seriously, coka cola actually sell bottled tap water here in the UK. We have extremely pure water n' all, but still - charging for tap water is hilarious. Good luck to 'em, if people are stupid enough to pay, they deserve to lose out. :D
Telemarketer companies have to pay for long distance phone calls, but that doesn'tstop them.
Yes, but telemarketing is a completely different economic scale. A spammer sends millions of messages at a time for a ROI (Return On Investment) of less than 1%. That means he must continue to send millions of messages in order to earn a few bucks.
Whereas telemarketing's ROI is much much higher than spam. It is so much higher that (1) they can afford to lease or own an office space, (2) they can afford equipment and phone service, (3) they can afford to pay employees who make the calls and (4) they can afford all the other overhead involved with a business {taxes, utilities, etc}.
Originally posted by TonyT
Yes, but telemarketing is a completely different economic scale. A spammer sends millions of messages at a time for a ROI (Return On Investment) of less than 1%. That means he must continue to send millions of messages in order to earn a few bucks.
Whereas telemarketing's ROI is much much higher than spam. It is so much higher that (1) they can afford to lease or own an office space, (2) they can afford equipment and phone service, (3) they can afford to pay employees who make the calls and (4) they can afford all the other overhead involved with a business {taxes, utilities, etc}.
That and also isn't there a "Do not call" list now? Spammers don't respect anything like that, they know there stuff is not wanted and do anything to get around spam filters.
Kyler1
Illini25
03-06-04, 09:11 PM
This was my first reaction:
"Bill Gates can go F*** himself!!!!!"
:D
The_Lurker
03-07-04, 08:54 AM
Originally posted by Ghosthunter
agree with going after them but dont it cost more money in the end to do that?
why not find a better way to prevent it?
insted of going after the spammers, wich may prove cost prohibative due to the complexities of the WORLD wide internet, go after the money, the people & companies who use spammers to advertize their products. start fining them for allowing the products to be advertized with spam.
forget the root of the problem......
cut the head off and the body will die.
(the roots will rot in the ground)
the people & companies who use spammers to advertize their products
Will never happen nor is it a good idea. You cannot regulate a manufacturer's promotional methods because they do not control how their products get advertised. It would be suppressive to govern just how something can be promoted on any media.
This idea strikes at the heart of free communication and freedom of speech. There already are existing laws that govern www content and their targeted viewers, but spammers ignore these laws. Regulation will not ever solve spam.
Spammers are criminals. More regulations and laws do not solve crime, in the entire history of planet earth, never has and never will.
The sole purpose of spam is to 'jam communication channels'. The apparant purpose is "to sell something and make money".
99% of the world's spam is sent by approx 2.5% of the world's www users.
accuspam
03-08-04, 04:06 AM
TonyT has been involved somewhat with AccuSpam, and we have appreciated his help. We need to correct some statements made in this thread by TonyT, as we feel they might be misleading. Perhaps I share some of the blame for Tony's apparent misunderstandings, as maybe I oversold him or overloaded him with many conflicting emails about spam and anti-spam over the last couple of years and especially the last several months. So apologies in advance Tony...
(1) It is incorrect to conclude that any anti-spam algorithm, such as AccuSpam's current CF or other CR systems (MailWiper and Qurb) could not run in a client. They do (MailWiper and Qurb) already. Spam and the client are related, not in the exact same way as spam and the network protocols, yet still a valid node in the spam issue.
(2) It is probably the wrong emphasis to characterize the problem with content filters to be that they don't block 1% of spam (i.e. claiming they only block 99%). The major problem is that they also block some percent of good email, and thus you have to browse ALL the spam. They in effect block 0% of spam (because you are still browsing it). The current AccuSpam algorithm suffers this same delimma, if not used exclusively for the case where all new senders come from the web site of the company for the protected email address. AccuSpam is currently working on an improvement which will address this delimma, which is common delimma shared by most (if not all) current anti-spam systems.
(3) AccuSpam does NOT "work 100%". It blocks 100% of spam (in theory), but it also blocks some good email from NEW senders (only), and only those who do not come from the web site of the protected user. Since Tony and AccuSpam's use of the AccuSpam algorithm has been exclusively for web-based businesses, then we have perceived 100% effectiveness (perfection in that no good email blocked as well as all spam blocked). See #2 above. We are working to solve this delimma in soon to be released improvement.
(4) IMO, the problem with MS's proposal is not only that it will be impractical to get all ISPs to implement it, it can't work reliably unless everyone uses it, and since people are free, not everyone will. The honest people will pay (or lose computing cycles) and the criminals will find a way not to use it. So it is not the cost to implement that is the main problem. The problem is you can't force will on internet. There can never be such thing as an authenticated id field or a secure communications channel (on internet or any where, just ask the cryptographers from WWII). It can't be made to work. It can always be hacked by those who have enough incentive to do so. The problem and solution is more relative economics. Just as there is no such thing as absolute security any where. It is always a relative deterent analysis. But that is another discussion...
(5) The concept of creating laws to stop spam (or creating protocols e.g. #4) is like saying we can make laws to stop hurricanes. How can a law or a protocol stop a hurricane? The only way to stop a hurricane is to understand the dynamics of what causes it and engineer towards those dynamics. It would be like making a law that says humans can not have sex. Impossible. You would instead have to make a anti-hormone pill. Or making a law that said people can not rob banks. People still rob banks. It is just they made the cost to rob them more expensive than the reward for most people. The problem is that laws can't increase the cost of spamming, because there is no such thing as a 100% enforceable international law and it only takes one venue to send spam. Besides spammers just hide their identity behind millions of hacked computers, etc.. Making a secure protocol will not work because it will be more expensive for the good users of email than it will be for the spammer.
AXIOM:
The only anti-spam that will be effective over the long-run is one that increases costs more for spammers (much more) than it does for good users.
(6) This is a false statement:
"The sole purpose of spam is to 'jam communication channels'. The apparant purpose is "to sell something and make money"."
The purpose of spam is to make $. Period. They make $ in many ways which may seem like noise, but they are making $ from that noise. Sometimes they get paid if they can just prove to advertiser the email was viewed in your client (using the embedded img trick) or they make money selling your captured financial data, etc... Sometimes they are simply spreading viruses which is to install a proxy to later make money on spamming or stealing data. Or even they can make $ by disrupting competitors, etc.. But it always boils down to criminal $ making motive.
(7) I also saw several statements from other users which are IMO misinformed. For example, the issue of open proxies is no longer that relevant, because 60% of spam comes from up to 1 million or more unknowningly hacked computers (and increasing all the time). Blocking open proxies might at best stop 20% of spam and getting worse. That the buzzwords in anti-spam are so quickly outdated, is indicative of the AXIOM above. Spammers morph very quickly as I warned and predicted in public many times:
This seems interesting:
http://www.corvigo.com/media/release/20040301.html
I had also thought that combining a neural-network with some sort of natural language parser might be more effective than word or phrase-order statistics. However, I still make the same comment I made to Paul Graham:
"Spam that learns to not be statistically identified?"
http://ixazon.dynip.com/pipermail/nilsimsa/2002-December/000041.html
when he first made his Bayesian proposal. I correctly predicted that spam would morph and create a worse situation than before Bayesian was popular.
If IBF ever becomes popular, then spammers will again just morph their message to look more like having the intent of normal email. In fact, spammers use the same technique as the anti-spam to train their messages. For example, for Bayesian, they embed an <IMG src=> tag in the email so they can track which messages pass the filter and then they can train their own filter to see which messages will pass most Bayesian filters.
I think content based filter is always doomed for this reason.
Shelby Moore
http://AccuSpam.com
Thanks for clarifying. :)
mccoffee
03-08-04, 07:19 AM
Originally posted by Jstyr
Doesn't surprise me one bit.
It's just a way to make money off something that is already free.
Next thing you know they'll be charging you internet fees on a 'per hop basis'.
Billy is trying to set a standard for profit just like he did with his os's. What's really funny is the guy who inveted the dns in this format bob@hotmail.com instead of typing 24.xxx.xx.xxx didn't make a dime.
I don't see how this is going to work.
You have spammers that use other peoples mail servers as hijacked proxys and send their crap through that box. Who would have to pay for the spam then?
I'm guessing they are only thinking about the "legit" spammers that actually have their own mass mailers..
Silly idea... IMHO
stevebakh
03-08-04, 01:23 PM
Email is one of the services I pay my ISP for. If it ever comes to the point where they want to charge for that usage, they can shove it and I will find some other medium to use.
tao_jones
03-08-04, 01:47 PM
Wasnt the US Post Office / Post Master General talking about charging a postage for email a couple of years back or am I crazy?
YeOldeStonecat
03-08-04, 01:56 PM
We'll see more and more ISP's and legitimate e-mail servers implementing "Reverse DNS"...where they only accept mail that passes PTR, basically a reverse record that compares an IP address with a registered name.
Rich next door to me started implementing this recently...he hosts mail for quite a few companies. Said the day he implemented this, his SPAM count on the server dropped from over 5,000 per day to around 1,000 per day. Quite a nice drop, and less work his other spam filters have to perform.
He said this will soon be widely used.
Originally posted by Illini25
This was my first reaction:
"Bill Gates can go F*** himself!!!!!"
:D
haha I think ill go with that :D
Bouncer
03-08-04, 06:03 PM
I think a lot of people are slamming MS without bothering to read what Gates is actually saying. Which is, unfortunately, typical. What he wants is for your computer to have to spend a few seconds processing some sort of packet (Say a SETI or Genome research packet) before your mail is sent.
For you and me it means a few seconds delay after you press send.
"Instead of paying a penny, the sender would "buy" postage by devoting maybe 10 seconds of computing time to solving a math puzzle. The exercise would merely serve as proof of the sender's good faith."
To a spammer it's death. Since there'd be a 1000000 second delay before they could spam 100k addresses. That's over 270 HOURS. The idea has merit both in that it would help Genome or SETI and at the same time truly limit the ability to send MASS emails of monstrous size.
It's clever, and quite doable. A small client on the PC or pop server could do this easily.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
I read an article abou this Bouncer and there was no mention of SETI or Genome, etc. It just stated that you would let your processor be used for a work unit.
I would probably be OK with it, but I'm thinking that the "math" being done would have to benefit the folks that thought up the idea "MS" and you would be turning out work units for them. If it was aligned with something like genome, and this was something that the end user could monitor, then I'm fine with it. If it's anything proprietary toward MS, then I'm against it.
I mean, if he wanted to crunch numbers for SETI or Genome, I'm sure he could setup quite a farm...
accuspam
03-24-04, 08:35 PM
The erroneous instinctive reaction is that since spam costs the community so much, then make us all pay a little more is correct reaction:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/03mar/slides/asrg-1/sld12.htm
And mention genome or other "good" causes, might lull us from thinking, that even a CPU cost is a real cost. Since 60% of spam is now sent from virally obtained proxies (your computer might be sending spam and you do not even know it), then that CPU cost multiplied by millions is going to render many systems unuseable.
And the actual CPU cost is small compared to the "complexity cost". Although the following article does not cover computation cost proposal (e.g. the MS research), the conclusion is still the same:
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/asrg/current/msg07506.html (shows that ASRG "experts" are aware of the article)
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1272889,00.asp (the article)
If you go back to my AXIOM in my only previous post in this thread, the fundamental (theoretical) problem with HashCash idea is that you can never succeed against spam by raising the community cost more than the cost on the spammers. The simple reason is that spammers have more incentive to find ways to drive those costs up very high for community, so spammer's relative cost is still very low, e.g. the reaction of spammers to use viral proxies to existing anti-spam methods. Analagous to using Agent Orange in Vietnam or using a nuclear bomb. The scorced earth policy kills everything, not just or usually except the "enemy" (they hide in caves below the ground because they have more incentive to know and care).
FYI, HashCash was the original invention by some researchers at IBM which predates MS's PennyBlack research:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/index.html
Regarding the use of "Reverse DNS" to stop 80% of spam, it will also stop 20% of good email, because when people are traveling they sometimes not connected through their ISP and thus can not relay the email over their ISP's relay (the one associated with the domain of their email address in the domain's MX DNS record). ISPs do not allow unauthenticated relaying, as spammers like to use unauthenticated relays. ISPs can implement a POP before Send (POP before SMTP) system in lieu of being connected (dialup or broadband connection) to their ISP, but so many have no yet, because for one reason, it is not easy-to-use and understand for novices. There are other authenticated SMTP relay standards in various stages of development and rollout.
However, even if connected through your ISP or using authenticated relay, what is to stop you from sending from an email address which is not the same as the domain of the relay you are using? For example, you have a web site, send your email over your ISP relay, but have your From address set to your web site domain. You would have create an authenticated relay for your web site, and send your email over that.
Even if every one in world will use authenticated relays that match the domain they are sending from, then we are still doomed with this method, because spammers can use viral proxies, offshore domains, stolen credit cards to continuously buy new domains, etc and other techniques to send from the MX record of domains they use.
So this is a horrible technique that ruins the simplicity and freedom of email. Again this is increasing the cost on the community in an erroneous attempt to increase costs on spammer. Please tell your "friend" how bad this "reverse dns" technique is!
All hope is not lost! AccuSpam is hopefully preparing to release something quite revolutionary which will finally increase costs on spammer without increasing costs on community! Yes you heard it first right here.
It won't make sense to you unless explained in great detail (it did not make sense to me at first), and it is almost opposite of way existing anti-spam works, but the concept is simple. If you sent me a good email and I do not know you (unsolicited), then do not reply to auto-response which asks if you sent me the email. And this is patented.
Remember what makes spam costly is not that it is unsolicited, it is that it is unsolicited and sent in great quantities. I have said for the last few years, that they only way to beat spam was to use it's bulk characteristic against itself. Thanks to a guy in Italy, I hope we have finally found the right method to do this.
-Shelby Moore
accuspam
03-24-04, 08:38 PM
Adding to previous post that "reverse dns" can not stop sender forgery (forging a From address that is not your own) within same domain.
Our upcoming new release for AccuSpam hopefully stops all sender forgery ("spoofing").
-Shelby
Bouncer
04-15-04, 09:12 AM
Then my response would be... good. If it makes the user aware that their computer is being used as a relay point by slowing it to a crawl then so be it. Users are, after all, responsible for their systems. They own them, and are responsible for maintaining them. Therefore, they should accept the consequences of not maintaining them, rather than push that responsibility out on all others, including those who DO maintain their systems.
Further, I find some of the links you posted while sounding authoritative don't, in fact, support your viewpoint at all. One of the IETF links was a presentation which made taht case that A) The cost of spam is increasing,, B) Legitimate mail is being lost as a result of filtering efforts and C) The system may actually collapse if it continues unchecked. According to the presentation, there were over a TRILLION spam message sent last year.
Finally, please do not try and push advertising across our board for your product. If you would like to buy advertising then perhaps you should consider contacting Phillip.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
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