June 25, 2003
Spam
There has been a lot of brouhaha on the Internet, court rooms, legislative houses, and web logs about SPAM. That wonderful thing that clogs our in boxes.
Most of the solutions have focused around filtering incoming email, and while that is an effective stopgap solution. (and one that I use) I think the industry needs to work more towards shifting costs towards the senders of email, and in addition creating networks of secured SMTP servers.
Bottom line: Secure the base mail standard instead of trying to monkey with the additional layers. SMTP is insecure by design (its a 20 year old standard) and needs to be updated into a secure standard somehow, either issuing certificates, or ensuring that the mail comes from trusted hosts.
I know this is not a technical description of what to do, but legislating spam and creating ever more sophisticated filters will only end in a war of escalation. Spam needs to be dealt with in a low level technological manner and not legal manner.