Umm... I hate to take away your taking away of the last example [LWN.net]

Umm... I hate to take away your taking away of the last example

Posted Sep 6, 2004 16:55 UTC (Mon) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632)
In reply to: Umm... I hate to take away your last example by Ross
Parent article: Debian rejects Sender ID

It does not solve the problem. SMTP authentication makes it necessary for you to authenticate with a server in order for it to accept your mail and relay it. It does not, however, require anything from you in order to deliver you a message created somewhere else for a local user.
The problem with spam is that it is too easy to set up a simple SMTP server. It is so easy that hundreds of people do it even without knowing. It is also an important problem with viruses/worms: You might not even know you have a SMTP client in your machine happily sending mail everywhere it can!

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Umm... I hate to take away your taking away of the last example

Posted Sep 7, 2004 1:10 UTC (Tue) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

I basically agree with your first paragraph. SMTP authentication doesn't
prevent receipt of spam, but it does prevent anonymous sending of spam.

You lose me in your second paragraph. Spammer's don't need to run SMTP
an server to send spam. As you say, an SMTP client can pump out messages as
quickly as it's network connection will allow. If you meant that people
accidently setup open SMTP relays which allow spammers to hijack their
servers then I agree, but it's an obvious problem with an obvious solution.