Thrusted mail ?

Posted May 7, 2004 12:37 UTC (Fri) by dd9jn (✭ supporter ✭, #4459)
In reply to: Thrusted mail ? by bockman
Parent article: 82% of email is spam

It is not only businesses receiving a lot of mail from yet unknown people but also people from the Free Software community, especially authors and maintainers. There is as well the problem of resending and forwarding messages.

Mailing lists are another problem. Of course the mailing list software could sign all message to be send out but that won't help. For a closed mailing list this will currently help but I have already encountered faked From addresses (which are the current way of authenticating subscribers) which led spam slip through. Open mailing lists (everyone is allowed to post) are already nice spam exploders and it won't help to have a signature applied by the ML software. Over short or long we have to change the authentication of mailing lists anyway to a stronger one (i.e. only accept signed posts), but this will require manual approval of subscription requests to sort out spammers. For some mailing lists this will not be possible at all - think of a help list for the signing or MUA software ;-).