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DJB's Internet Mail 2000
DJB's Internet Mail 2000
Posted Dec 19, 2003 16:40 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: DJB's Internet Mail 2000 by jhohm
Parent article: Spam-proofing the mail system
In this proposal, the text of an email is stored at the sending end, and the recipients are all sent a brief message telling them to go to the sending system and request the text.
The only problem this seems to solve is one where a recipient has a small email storage quota and spammers keep filling it up.
This does not turn the economics around -- the spammer would presumably store one copy of the spam, at insignificant cost, but the recipients would still bear the expense of reviewing all the spam.
And it happens to be what we have today much of the time. A spammer sends a trivially small email telling you to go to his web site and read an ad.
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DJB's Internet Mail 2000
Posted Dec 25, 2003 21:56 UTC (Thu) by jbayko (guest, #3493) [Link]
This does not turn the economics around -- the spammer would presumably store one copy of the spam, at insignificant cost, but the recipients would still bear the expense of reviewing all the spam.
It's not a matter of storage space, and only partially of bandwidth, but mainly time. A spammer would need to keep the spam available for however long the last recipient they want to read it will take - could be a month. Not only that, but will need to keep off any sort of easily- checked blacklist. Good ISPs may take a day or two to cut off service (thus saving millions of recipients from even seeing the spam header).
What would make it harder, there would need to be some reasonable authentication or encryption used, to prevent unauthorized users from eading each other's email. The spammer's system would have to keep track of all users who the email was sent to, to handle all this authentication or encryption/decryption (there are many possible variations for security).