clickie
join:2005-05-22
Monroe, MI
| reply to GOLFnSUN
Re: Why would anyone here be surprised?
I don't agree with your comments, but I agree with a portion of your premise. Indeed, it's time that the internet community respond to a problem created by technology with a technological solution.
Seems to me that it would be a rather easy to implement something to permit the recipient to verify the identity of the sender. By giving levels of trust, it could be easy to filter mail appropriately either by the end reader or at the final MTA, whichever the recipient so desires. Once someone reports a breach of trust with a sender's credentials, that information can be stored to assist others.
Of course, does Postini, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and a handful of large ISPs really want this problem solved? Effective spam filtering is either a money maker or a marketing point for these people, and solving the problem affects their bottom line. |
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pog
Premium
join:2004-06-03
Kihei, HI
 ·Hawaiian Telcom
| said by clickie  :Seems to me that it would be a rather easy to implement something to permit the recipient to verify the identity of the sender. Seems to me you need to read up on things a bit.
Such systems already exist and have for many years... all have flaws, some very serious, that make them universally unadoptable. The basic fact is that email was originally built around trust and good faith... so any attempt to secure it is going to involve a kludge.
There is no magic bullet... all solutions have varying levels of collateral damage and/or ineffectiveness.
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clickie
join:2005-05-22
Monroe, MI
| Seems to me you're making the assumption that I don't know about SPF or domainkeys, et al. They fail because they try to stop spam within the MTA and don't give enough control the recipient to determine the level of trust they're willing to accept. All that remains is the way you determine trust; X.509 certificates or various signature schemes.
The MTA is built around trust, but that doesn't mean the client has to impart the same trust. Using multipart MIME formatting makes it compatible with existing mail systems, and isn't any more of a kludge than HTML/rich text formatting. |
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