(I have removed the various other mailing lists. People, please stop cross-posting to all of Hettinga's lists, plus Perrypunks, plus this CAM-RAM list.) On Dec 30, 2003, at 7:11 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 07:46 PM 12/30/2003 +0000, Richard Clayton <richard@highwayman.com> wrote:
[what about mailing lists] Obviously you'd have to whitelist anybody's list you're joining if you don't want your spam filters to robo-discard it.
<moan> I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let alone a cryptographic one :-( </moan>
The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries. Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their lists, or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the signature so that you can discard the forgeries that pretend to be from them.
I don't have to whitelist anyone. If mail doesn't get to me, less junk to read. I certainly won't be running some "Pennyblacknet" scam promulgated by Microsoft. This "pennyblack" silliness fails utterly to address the basic ontological issue: that bits in transit are not being charged by the carriers (if by their own choice, fine, but mostly it's because systems were set up in a socialist scheme to ensure "free transport"...now that the free transport means millions of e-mails are charged nothing, they want the acapitalist system fixed, they hope, with either government laws or silliness about using memory speeds to compute stamp numbers...silliness). I haven't looked closely at the Pennyblack scheme, but I expect cleverness with caches and background tasks will fix things. For example, maybe people with idle CPU/memory time will sell their time to spammers, at suitably close-to-zero rates. (Essentially equivalent to Joe Sixpack selling his machine as a spam machine, which is probably likely, and still cheap for the sender.) Fixing the fundamental market distortion is the best approach to pursue. Not my problem. --Tim May