> So they spam from Belize <http://www.belize.net> and get off scott-free?
>
> The solution is Athentication. When we KNOW who is knocking at the door,
> we can open it or keep it shut.
> Caller ID has helped for phones - if I don't recognized the phone number,
> or (worse) it's "restricted", the call goes straight to the answering machine.
But we don't have an Internet Caller ID -- we just have a reverse DNS lookup
and identd, and that last is so easy to spoof ... In fact, stockholm has a
fake identd running that answers 'nobody' to every query, just as an object
example, to satisfy stupid services that insist the other side be running
some sort of ident.
Besides, the reverse DNS lookup doesn't help much with the mega-scale
spammers who operate on six billion throwaway accounts.
The Amazing Mailhole, which I wrote and use here, makes people authenticate to
get mail through the public E-mail address I expose, but spammers still send
mail to it anyway (it's just ignored) and people usually ignore the
instructions and I never see the mail until days later when I'm cleaning out
the spam folder where the Mailhole has routed all the unauthenticated
messages.
There's no good solution for this other than legal action. After all, I want
my cut of the hard disk here and CPU time and electricity and network
spent handling mailing lists I didn't subscribe to and can't get off of.
Surely I can sue them for that. (I'm only *half* kidding.)
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser_at_stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- You're never too old to become younger. -- Mae West ------------------------
Received on Thu Jun 21 2001 - 14:39:01 BST