Russell Nelson writes:
Yes, this is true. John Gilmore is a pain in the ass for standing on his rights (some government types might say *fucking* pain in the ass), but he is correct. ALL of the effort spent to secure open relays was basically wasted effort, because spammers just moved on to insecure client machines. The proper route to control spam is to involve users in prioritizing their email, so that their friend's email comes first, followed by anybody they've sent mail to, followed by people they've gotten email from before, followed by mailing list mail, followed by email from strangers (which is where all the spam is). All of that relies on email authentication to work.
Spammers will start hijacking authenticated servers. The solution is to automatically classify messages according to user preference. Good software to do this is already in mainstream MUAs, and even better software to do it is open source (google for "weka machine learning" as an example). Someday (hopefully soon), MUAs will be able to automatically classify messages into more than two categories. There is already phenomenal software (reeltwo.com; commercial but based on Weka) to do this very quickly and accurately. -- Chris Palmer Staff Technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation 415 436 9333 x124 (desk), 415 305 5842 (cell) 81C0 E11D CE73 4390 B6C7 3415 B286 CD8F 68E4 09CD [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]