CNN.com on Remailers

[Steven Furlong]

David Honig wrote:
> 
> At 02:42 PM 12/18/01 -0800, Meyer Wolfsheim wrote:
> >On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:
> >
> >> Can't spam be repelled by not forwarding email not encrypted to
> >> the remailer's key?
> >
> >Who is to say that spammers won't use remailer clients that automatically
> >encrypt to the remailers' keys?
> 
> Yes they could.
> 
> >
> >Using remailer clients should be *easy*. Saying "this is too hard for the
> >average spammer to figure out" isn't acceptable.
> 
> The most commonly held point of view that I've
> perceived on this list is that spammers are too lazy/stupid
> to do this -or even add a simple string token to a line.

To maximize their efficiency *, spammers want to send the same message
to everyone on a large list of addresses, with a small amount of effort
and attention on their part. Any special effort necessary to get the
spam to a given address is not a worthwhile ROI. (And it's probably not
worth the effort to remove the address from the list, either.) This is
also the point behind the hashcash proposal: the sender's machine has to
burn a certain number of cycles to make a hash which will convince the
recipient to accept each message. **

* Efficiency is the useful output divided by the effort input.
"Efficiency" for a useless endeavor such as spamming is problematical.

** Eric, if you're reading this, I really am putting some work in on
this, just not at a high enough rate to produce any output. Efficiency
of 0.

-- 
Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere     Have GNU, will travel