Problem with your 'Solution' [LWN.net]

Problem with your 'Solution'

Posted May 6, 2004 23:19 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803)
In reply to: Problem with your 'Solution' by dlang
Parent article: 82% of email is spam

Ok, by that definition of zombie, IM2000 would mostly stop it, if not totally. In most cases, it would have to provide the IP address of the compromised box in order to "work", and the box would have to run a mail server, and not have a firewall. That kind of thing would be easy to detect, but of course I suppose a few idiots will let it go on unnoticed. And a compromised box IP would likely be blacklisted quickly.

With the distributed blacklist (assuming it is administered in a trustworthy manner) would almost certainly make the cost to spam way too high.

As for mailing lists, the protocol changes somewhat drastically. See Bernstein's site, he talks about it.

> what happens if the senders server is down or unreachable when I want to read the message?

That is the second biggest problem with the system, after transition difficulties. Basically, someone (your ISP or you) needs to run a reliable mail server. That's a minor disadvantage perhaps, but keep in mind how it compares to 1200 spams a day.

> this idea would work in a world where everyone has pleanty of bandwidth and storage and everything is always up, but in the real world it's little better then a dream to toy with. some good may come of it, but this is nowhere near being a deployable system.

I really don't see how you can come to that conclusion. Of course it's deployable. It doesn't even use more bandwidth and storage in the long run. It will use much less bandwidth because of less spam. And storage would be less because it would only store one copy of an outgoing message to many users. Receiver-side storage would only be on his local computer, not on the server. (Ok, an IMAP-like mode could change that.)

(Log in to post comments)