Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com> writes:

At 12:52 PM 9/17/96 -0400, Rabid Wombat wrote:

...

I'd say it's a safe bet that the unscrupulous could easily sell a large, up-to-date list of email addresses of people who DON'T want junk email to people who want to send such mail.

That's why the list should be distributed (as the original poster mentioned) in hashed format - the junk email people would then hash their own list(s), and would know not to send to addresses where the hashes matched. The unmatched hashes addresses on the "block" list aren't otherwise useful to the junk e-mail folks.

That's an excellent idea! Store the SHA5 of the do-not-e-mail addresses and have the scrubbing program compute SHA5 of the addresses on the spammer's list and delete the ones that match. I guess, fold the case and normalize the %-hacked addresses.

It's an interesting idea .. but who is going to pay for it? (doh.)

Not one of the spammers. Perhaps someone at an .edu site. Perhaps some ISP, for free publicity. I'd expect that the service would get a lot of e-mail traffic for the first few weeks, while everyone who cares about it would get their addresses on the list; and then it'll be just another FTP server. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps