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. You'll also see spammers increasingly _joining_ large mailing lists, so that they can get around members-only features. At least one large mailing list farm on which I've joined a list used a Turing-test GIF to make automated list joining difficult, and Yahoo limits the number of Yahoogroups you can join in a day, but that's the kind of job which you hire groups of Indians or other English-speaking third-world-wagers to do for you. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com