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by Mike Masnick




JamSpam - An AntiSpam Consortium That Might Really Do Something

from the get-together... dept

Laws against spam clearly don't work. Filters against spam seem to work to a certain degree - but have their own set of problems. Increasingly, it seems that people are warming to the idea that in order to prevent spam emails, we need to change the way email works. I'm still on the fence about this, because changing something that is so massively entrenched leads to all sorts of unintended consequences, but I'm willing to listen. Now, it seems that a group of interested (and fairly powerful) parties from many different companies and anti-spam groups are getting together to start the JamSpam consortium, which will look into ways to stop spam at lower levels. Basically, they want to build spam protection into email protocols. This is a very early stage effort, but one worth following.

3 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    Feb 7th, 2003 @ 12:14pm
  • JamSpam

    Awesome idea if it truly can be accomplished. Just some questions though: How do you hope to address SPAM through the protocol layer? Is this looking for some sort of Global User ID, akin to that which got Intel into hot water when they tried to put that into chips? Is this yet another way to erode privacy, or are you going to require a response from the supposed sender verifying that they have indeed sent the e-mail? What is the difference between this idea and truly the same ideas that came from PKI, and couldn't we just solve this by making PKI a rtequirement?

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • Feb 7th, 2003 @ 1:31pm
  • No Subject Given

    I think its more of a "certified" mail server type of approach that has the most promise. Some kind of verification at the transport layer would allow a mail server to automatically ignore mail with bad headers. If spammers have to use valid mail accounts and headers it is that much easier to track him down after the fact. In effect, it drastically raises the cost of spamming, hopefully to a point whre is does not make economic sense to do it.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  • Feb 9th, 2003 @ 10:55am
  • No Subject Given

    by keith knutsson

    i will wait and see... it is very hard to stop the spammers

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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