Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 08:36:27 +0100 From: njs3@doc.ic.ac.uk (Niall Smart) To: "Andrew Atrens" <atrens@nortel.ca> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: pulling email addresses from freebsd lists Message-ID: <E0xNYrc-0004nJ-00@oak67.doc.ic.ac.uk>
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> > www.vix.com/spam seems to have been updated since my last visit in August - > they have several new tools (or at least new to me) that you may find helpful. > > Imho the (more or less) free and open nature of the net, means that spammers > will always be a problem. I disagree, I believe that (mail) protocols which require authentication and tracability of the sender would cut spam dramatically, the problem is that the internet's core protocols were designed with the assumption that no-one would deliberately abuse them, that was fine in the 70's and 80's but isn't the case today. If, when you received spam, you could determine the senders email, name, and phone number the amount of complaints to spammers and their ISP's would rise massively. It would also provide the technological infrastructure that governments need to enforce anti-spam legislation. If the spammers knew their identity was available, and knew they would get caught and prosecuted, then they wouldn't do it. > I think our biggest advantage is that we outnumber > them. I think our biggest weakness is that we address the issue as individuals, > ie we don't leverage our numbers. I agree. > > Perhaps we could come up with some sort of automated mechanism for collecting > and collectively complaining to joe spammer's isp. What I'm getting at it is > that when one of us on the list gets spam, likely we all do. Yet in most > instances we all need to go through the effort of identifying the guilty party, > and sending an appropriate complaint. if this information was captured somewhere, > and accessible by (perhaps) a web interface, then it would save all of the > duplicated investigation work required to nail down the spammer's identity. This sounds like a good idea. Also, how about modifying majordomo so that it does not show the senders email address, just their name? Obviously this makes things awkward if two people on the list want to communicate privately and do not know each others email address.. an obfuscated email in the signature would help this. (e.g. n_js3_@do_c.ic.a_c.u_k) Niall
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