> From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com> > ... > Most of it is. But that's not an incredibly interesting point: I think > we can all agree that there is a lot of spam that is forged and there > is a lot of spam that isn't forged. There is too much of either type. > > It sometimes seems like people are saying "it's no use going after spam > that's forged as there's always the non-forged type" but then also > "it's no use to go after non-forged spam because spammers simply forge > headers to get by filters". May I suggest taking logic 101 again for > those of you who think this makes sense? That is a red herring. That forgery is not a required part of spam does not imply that stopping forged spam is useless. However, many people are uninterested in mechanisms that reduce their own spam loads by less than 80%. Few care about mechanisms that would stop only 50%, not to mention 15%. > > If you watch much spam without religious blinders, you know > > that the religion that enough ISPs care about spam is delusional. > > If an ISP doesn't yank the mail identity from people that spam and/or > lets spam through from known spammers, that would be a good reason to > require additional validation for identities used by customers of this > ISP. That is an intersting point, but only if you think that ISPs that don't care enough about spam today to yank accounts (even of resellers) will bother to provide any of the things that might be called "additional validation of identities." Otherwise, you may as well permanently blacklist those ISPs by their IP addresses with supplemental whitelists of your correspondents that patronize them, and declare victory in the spam war. Most of the anti-forgery proposals depend on ISPs doing lots expensive work with the intended result in many cases of preventing spammers from using the services of the ISPs that would do that work and today are not terminating those same accounts....talk about a need for Logic 101! Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com