Text 605, 38 rader
Skriven 2004-09-16 19:50:10 av Geo. (1:379/45)
    Kommentar till text 603 av John Beckett (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: Spammers faster than the good guys....
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From: "Geo." <georger@nls.net>

"John Beckett" <FirstnameSurname@compuserve.com.omit> wrote in message
news:41481217.1103066@216.144.1.254...

> Yes - I see your point about that. We will have to wait and see how
> frequently such mindless vandalism occurs. There probably are a number of
> ways that my email address could be rendered useless by an avalanche of
> junk.

Here's the kind of problem we face. I forget which RFC it is that specifies
that all bounce messages are supposed to come from a null address
<>@yourdomain.com but pretty much all mail servers are specifically programmed
to just accept anything that comes from a null address like this. So some
spammers have tried to spam with (big surprise) a null return address. As a
result, you no longer know if your mail got to where it was supposed to go
because lots of people now block null addresses.

Many people don't understand it but this is a HUGE reliability issue caused
because of technical means to block spam. It used to be that you always knew if
your email got to where it was supposed to go or not. Today emails, millions of
emails, simply evaporate never to be seen again because of technical spam
fighting. The more we lock down the mail system the more complex it becomes and
the less reliable it becomes, complexity breeds unreliability.

It's stuff like that which makes it clear to me that if we want a reliable mail
system then we are never going to be able to beat spam using technical means.
It's just not possible especially in a world where 90% of the email is being
filtered out. The only way to get the spammers to stop spamming is to make it
too expensive or take their funding away. We have tried to make it too
expensive, it didn't work.

As long as the money is there, someone is going to find a way to spam us.

Geo.

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