On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, Scott Hazen Mueller wrote:
address verification may or may not be enough. There is no statute or case law that makes the owner of an address legally liable for the mail emitting from there - this could be an issue for claims of forgery and the like.
Scott -- I believe that the legal ins and outs are mostly moot. The scope of spam is global while most law is national or local. To use less-than-global law to regulate something of a global nature, you would need customs services that would prevent spam from being smuggled in from other jurisdictions where spam is legal. I believe that the only thing you can do with courts is to use the civil courts to discourage spammers. You sue the bastards, but only after you get abused.
*possibly* be the infrastructure for building the second. However, limiting anonymity likely wouldn't provide a strong deterrent by itself, since spammers could still run through multiple non-anonymous dialup accounts over the lifetime of a spam campaign.
The basic concepts about email have to change. The present system is hopelessly out of date.
The scheme has generally not been sketched in much further detail because the deployment issues typically overwhelm any discussion.
One way this could happen is with large content providers. They must see spammers the same way that we do -- As parasites. If AOL and CIS et al wanted a UCE-free protocol, i'm sure that Qualcom and Netscape et al would support it. Somebody let me know when beta testing starts. Bill