On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote:

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:07:30 -0400, Matthew Crocker wrote:

...

It can be built without choke points. ISPs could form trust relationships with each other and bypass the central mail relay. AOL for example could require ISPs to meet certain criteria before they are allowed direct connections. ISPs would need to contact AOL, provide valid contact into and accept some sort of AUP (I shall not spam AOL...) and then be allowed to connect from their IPs. AOL could kick that mail server off later if they determine they are spamming.

Now there is an idea! However an improved variant is to make the entire internet a 'trust relationship' using the (obvious) steps you propose. For several months I have been pondering possible details of implementing same; see <http://www.camblab.com/misc/univ_std.txt>. Comments welcome.

Surely it already is ? That is I only announce routes of my customers who I trust, my upstreams and peers trust me and what i announce to them, their upstreams/peers do and so on. And yet we still have hijacked netblocks and ddos's with uncaring sysadmins. Why should email be any different? And if you do implement such a system, the spammers will just adapt.. the recent viruses (sobig) are an example of how spammers can open up end user machines to facilitate sending of email, providing they can control such a host they can simply relay thro the providers' smtps.. they dont need open relays to send out their junk! I think we're still trying to treat the symptom tho not the cause. Most of these spammers are companies based within our countries, if we can make their kind of advertising illegal the spam will reduce (not sure if it will disappear, it could be like tax - companies may open offshore offices to facilitate this, but we need to keep working on the cause... ) Steve