[Somewhat off topic] All (100%) of my clients delete spam with an expletive at the end of the operation, do the people who pay for spam ads realize that they are wasting their money? Louis. -----Original Message----- From: owner-ietf@IETF.ORG [mailto:owner-ietf@IETF.ORG]On Behalf Of Vernon Schryver Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 7:01 PM To: ietf@IETF.ORG Subject: Re: Why spam is a problem. > From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> > > As all of us who have gone go court with a TCPA action know, that > > is wrong. You generally file against the advertiser instead of > > the fax blaster. > > Has that worked (honest question)? The feds and states always seem to go > after the initiator of the call. Even in those cases where they appear to > go after the advertiser, it is one and the same party. I offered to settle and collected my costs. Notice I did use the word "work." Doing the TCPA dance is a lot of effort, and effective only against local outfits, unless you spend a serious amount of time and legal expertise. See http://www.junkfaxes.org/ The future of spam is fast approaching. It does not involve authentication, because mail from strangers is still mail from strangers whether it has a Verisign signed signature or anything else. Mail from strangers might or might not be spam. If you want to make your mailbox private, you can do that now. If PGP, SMIME, etc. are too much work, then pick a username that is very obscure and give it only to people you trust. And no, it's not a matter of spammers being anonymous. Essentially no spammer is anonymous today, because essentially all of them leave billing trails at their ISPs and because anonymizing SMTP open relays have almost entirely disappeared. Spammers are anonymous only in the sense that ISPs can'be be bothered to check their logs and launch lawyers. The future of spam won't involve paying individuals to receive mail, because that's just too much trouble and expense. It would work for celebrities, but for the rest of us it would be equivalent to giving up on a public mailbox. DNS blacklists will remain, but will continue to help against only the worst, most unambiguous spammers. Other schemes including various content filters will also help. Still other schemes such as teergrubing are based on wishful thinking and ignorance of how the Internet and SMTP work in practice. The main path will be that bulk mail will be taxed at about $0.10 per target with stiff criminal penalties for evading the tax. The money will be split evently between the taxing bureaucracy and ISPs in the name of "fighting terrorism," "closing the digital divide," and "for the kids." That will end the whack-a-mole spammers and leave the field open to the Fortune 200,000 and anyone else who wants to hire a DMA member. It will also throttle the spam in mailboxes much as the costs of bulk paper mail throttle it. Some of us will use bulk detectors like the DCC to throttle it more. Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com