DJB's Internet Mail 2000

DJB's Internet Mail 2000

Posted Dec 25, 2003 21:56 UTC (Thu) by jbayko (guest, #3493)
In reply to: DJB's Internet Mail 2000 by giraffedata
Parent article: Spam-proofing the mail system

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).

---

(Log in to post comments)