Re: SPF and egos

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 09:59:53PM -0800, Jeff Silverman wrote:
> > 
> >
> Is SPAM really a technical problem?  Clearly SPAM is a problem, but it 
> isn't clear to me that SPAM is a technical problem.  The real source of 
> the problem with SPAM is that there are some people who are ethically 
> challenged who misuse it.
> 
> Now, we are all technicians and we're working on technical solutions for 
> this non-technical problem.  And maybe that's why we're not making much 
> progress.


With the same argument you could ask a bank to not put the 
money into a safe because bank robbery is an ethical problem while
a safe is a technical matter. 

I don't believe that there is any spammer who sends spam because he's
"ethically challenged" to do it.

I agree that the question "What is Spam?" is not purely technical and 
thus it is difficult to write a technical program to detect spam. 

But we are talking about smtp sender verification and SMTP's flaw to 
accept arbitrary sender e-mail addresses. That's definitely a
technical matter. This enables SPAM, like a bank which does not put the
money into a safe enables bank robbery.

And what's your point after all? Should we close this working group
and mailing list? Should we found an ethical commission to
pathetically declare to the world that we found that spam is 
ethically wrong? Do you believe this will help against spam?


regards
Hadmut