Re: Summary of Issues Raised to date

>David Harris wrote: On 16 Mar 2004 at 16:18, David Nicol wrote:
> > I see a dissonance due to combining of multiple goals.  The
> > implementors on this list want to pare out weightless specifications
.........
>
>Perhaps it would be appropriate to reiterate the primary goal of this
>group, as defined on the ASRG web site:
>
>     1: Investigate the requirements for a common header to be
>     produced by filters (something like "Filtered-By"), so MUAs do
>     not have to look for different types of headers
>
>This seems like a very simple, achievable goal to me, but the recent
>threads on this list seem to me to have lost sight of it. A lot of the
>discussion going on at present seems to be in the form of ideas that
>grow legs and rush off into the undergrowth to battle demons.
>
>I hate to be the one who suggests a lowest-common-denominator
>approach to a problem, but I really think that's what we need to be doing
>here. Instead of trying to solve *all* the header-related problems we can
>think of, why not start off with the simplest thing we think we might
>actually be able to achieve and build on that?

Well, since the cat is ut of the box, what is the lowest common denominator 
header with a lowest possible spoofing risk, than to put the label [SPAM] 
first on the subject line?

Since the spammers don't know what actions it will induce down the line, 
they will unlikly go that way, for if they try to do a DoS attack with it, 
they will just induce the attack to be sorted out anyway. And since both 
MTA, MDA and MUAs is able to read it readilly, it is "just perfect" in its 
simplicity. It works in my Earnest, I know it does with Spamassassin, in a 
Milter filter, procmail/elm's filter, in my Pegasus client at home ;-), 
Outlook, Notes .........  It is just to decide what possible actions it need 
to trigger in "my" MTA, MDA, filter or client.

I know that it on a personal plane is more satisfying to do a more complex 
solution, but as history shows, those functions that works and get used, are 
the simplest ones. We need to remember that IETF and the supporting 
workgroups don't have a control of the net, for if we had, spam would never 
happened. The simpler, the less risk of errors and the faster the roll-out. 
And there do exist a RFC for it somewhere, from end -90:ies when a group 
worked with commercial mailings having a subject tag saying "ADV:".

Regards Kurt

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