The Only Way To Can The Spam
from the anonymity-is-for-suckers dept
Business Week takes on the challenge of dissecting every proposed spam solution and pointing out why it will fail. It's a good summary of many of the (mostly half-assed) proposals to end spam. They come to the conclusion that the only way to really prevent spam is to authenticate every email with a special digital signature, so that it can be tracked. The problem, of course, is there are plenty of good reasons why people might want to be anonymous online. The writer suggests that ISPs should make it much easier to encrypt any message, such that it can still be authenticated, but no one - except those who its intended for - can read it. That solves some of the problems but not all. There still may be situations where you want more complete anonymity, in which case there should be some sort of opening for fully anonymous email. However, to prevent spam, perhaps any such anonymous email system should be limited in the number of messages it can send out at any particular time.
Reader Comments (rss)
(Flattened / Threaded)
No Subject Given by aNonMooseCowherd on Jul 8th, 2003 @ 9:39pm
The best solution is to make the sender pay. Or rather, offer users the option of receiving no-pay SMTP email or sender-pays email through a new protocol. The BW article says this will cause spammers to exploit more poorly-configured mail servers. Well, that should be a good incentive for sysadmins not to run open mail relays.
(reply to this comment) (link to this comment)
Add Your Comment