[late followup, sorry] On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 05:42:17AM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
The real fight is to find ANY techniques that have long-term, global benefit in reducing spam.
We've already got them -- we've always had them. What we lack is the guts to *use* them. As we've seen over and over again, the one and only technique that has ever worked (and that I think ever *will* work) is the boycott -- whether enforced via the use of DNSBLs or RHSBLs or local blacklists or firewalls or whatever mechanism. It works for a simple reason: it makes the spam problem the problem of the originator(s), not the recipient(s). It forces them to either fix their broken operation (any network which persisently emits or supports spam/abuse is broken) or find themselves running an intranet. We've known that this works for 20-odd years. It hasn't stopped working; what's stopped is the willingness to use it en masse, and to endure the consequences of thereof. And no new technology, however clever, is a substitute for the will to make this happen when necessary. I grow rather tired of people whining about the spam (and abuse) problem on the one hand...while refusing to take simple, well-known, and proven steps to push the consequences back on those responsible for it. While we may no longer be in a position to remove particularly egregious networks from the Internet, we most certainly are in a position to remove the Internet from them via coordinated group action -- producing an equivalent result. It's gonna come down to this sooner or later anyway. We might as well do it now, rather than waste another decade fiddling around with clever-but-useless technical proposals and worthless legislation while the problem continues to proliferate and diversify. ---Rsk