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Major Internet Standards Group Working On Fast Plan To Can Spam (TechWeb)

[Posted May 26, 2003 by ris]

TechWeb covers the efforts of the Anti-Spam Research Group, an affiliate of the Internet Engineering Task Force. "The ASRG expects quick results, with initial technologies that will take a big bite out of spam being deployed within months, and other key technologies being deployed in one to two years."
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Good luck

Posted May 27, 2003 0:54 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I used to subscribe to the ASRG list, but it was really just a high-noise-level forum of bickering. I hope it has improved since I unsubscribed (I might check the archives, if any), but based on the heat and noise on the list when I was subscribed, I'm not optimistic that there will be quick effective action.

Major Internet Standards Group Working On Fast Plan To Can Spam (TechWeb)

Posted May 27, 2003 4:31 UTC (Tue) by LinuxLobbyist (guest, #6541) [Link]

We can only hope that this working group opposes patent encumbered ways of blocking spam. The *only* people that should have to pay (extra) to block spam are the spammers themselves, not the implementors of technologies (other than the investment of time, of course).

I hope they are considering *all* existing SMTP servers so that exim, courier, and powermail (all covered by the GPL) will be seen as important and must be allowed to implement any standards without being forced to change their respective licenses (which in some cases, may not be possible).

Anybody know what the working group's policy is? I wasn't able to find enough info on it.

Major Internet Standards Group Working On Fast Plan To Can Spam (TechWeb)

Posted May 27, 2003 15:43 UTC (Tue) by pjs (guest, #10927) [Link]

It sounds like the only proposal expected within "months" is Reverse MX.

At first I thought this was the existing practice of looking up the PTR record for the IP number of the connecting MTA sending the message, to make sure its hostname matches the domain name of the sender line.

But I did a bit of searching, and it looks like this is the "rfc", or may become an rfc someday:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-danisch-dns-rr-smtp-01.txt

This sounds like a pretty good idea, since the PTR records are often maintained by someone other than the domain name owner and they don't restrict the valid senders to only the specific IP numbers that ought to sending email for that domain.

The migration path looks pretty easy, since mail servers doing reverse mx checks are (at least initially) supposed to allow incoming messages if the claimed sender's DNS server doesn't respond with a RMX record. But hopefully the many ISPs will soon add RMX's that will force spammers to search out clueless ISP without RMX records defined in order to fake the sender address.

I wonder when/if sendmail will have this check added ?


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