E-Mail Authentication Will Not End Spam, Panelists Say

[Chris Palmer]

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)

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