CDR: Re: [Spam wars, continued...]

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 08:37:31PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> At 12:22 PM 11/5/00 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
> >On Sun, 5 Nov 2000, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> >
> >> Well, let's take this up one level of abstraction. We can stop spam
> >> from flooding our inboxes (an economic bad) by:
> >> 1. law
> >"Congress shall make no law ...".
> >> 3. cypherpunkly end-user technology
> >I obviously support anything an individual wishes to do with respect to
> >making choices, provided they don't involve me without consent. This
> >aspect should be pushed strongly.
> 
> I agree with Jim that anti-spam laws are bad in principle;
> in practice they're usually worse :-)
> Some kinds of cypherpunks technology don't involve the law; some do.  
> For instance, user-supplied filters can trigger libel laws
> ("Hey, your filter called me a SPAMMER!  I'll SUE!").


Maybe I'm too limited in my thinking, but I don't see this actually
happening with usr-level filtering.  Mostly for the simple reason that
it doesn't make sense to send anything back to the spammer. They're
usually spamming from a bogus address or a throw-away or pointing
>From: and Reply-to: to some unfortunate victim.  In the latter two cases,
the recipient's email account soon overflows with complaints.
So there's not much use in replying to spam.  All the recpient
can do is filter it into a seperate file or throw it out entirely.
The spammer will not know what action users have taken, so they
can't complain.

This is different from the MAPS case, where the sites that use MAPS
(and RBL etc) refuse to accept mail identified by MAPS as coming from
spam sites or open relays.  This way, the spammer finds out that
their spam is rejected, and there's a big organization (MAPS or
larger sites using it) to go after.

If it's a "cypherpunks technology" spam filter, then there's no commercial
program for spammers to test their spam on and no company to sue.

In any case, I beleive that end-user spam filters should allow individual
users to customize the filters or replace them entirely.

I've written a simple user-level filter that attempts to
recognize spam by the emails content instead of the headers.
It's still a crude experiment at this point, but it seems to be
working ok for me.

http://www.lne.com/ericm/spammaster/


-- 
  Eric Murray           Consulting Security Architect         SecureDesign LLC
  http://www.securedesignllc.com                            PGP keyid:E03F65E5