[ On Fri, October 31, 1997 at 10:47:20 (-0500), Peter E. Giza wrote: ]
Subject: Re: potentially profitable spam countermeasures
My bucks worth. The *real* issue is that spam steals bandwidth by using more than an "average" users worth of bandwidth. Postal systems the world over have a simple solution, one must buy a stamp first. I am not advocating an email "pay before you use policy", however if one were to look at the number of out-going messages that a "typical" email user generates on any given day it likely on the order of <100. Given this, if everyone's AUP stated that unless negotiated by said user and ISP previously, that all out-going email exceeding <some number> would be subject to a bulk mail charge of $X.X per message.
Lots of ISPs seem to have such limits stated in their AUPs already but many don't seem to have a decent way of enforcing them. To that end I recently added the first part of a control that does just exactly that to smail. It'll be in the next beta release. Of course a belligerent spammer could still open many more consecutive (and concurrent) connections to the relay host to try to bypass such limits but such attempts will hopefully be far more visible to operators watching out for trouble, and more advanced solutions could be implemented with relative ease as well. -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP <gwoods@acm.org> <robohack!woods> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>