Re: Problems with SPF, solutions, and a timeline.

>> The first problem is the biggest, whether preventing envelope forgery
>> will in practice deter spammers.  If not, the whole LMAP exercise is
>> pointless.
>
>  I see.  So because one proposal isn't the perfect magic bullet in
>and of itself, we shouldn't use it.  I thought we had rejected this
>argument *months* ago on ASRG.

Alan, snide answers that don't address the issue you're putatively
responding to are not helpful.

The question isn't whether LMAP is a magic bullet.  The question is
whether LMAP will accomplish enough to be worth the enormous cost
of deploying it across the net.

The two big problems facing e-mail today are spam and phishing.  There
are a lot of other issues that are important to some people, like
bounce floods, but are not a big issue for the net as a whole.  It's
clear that LMAP would prevent bounce floods, but at this point, I
can't see how it would have much effect on spam and phishing because
it is so easy to work around and always will be, unless you make some
rather implausible assumptions that every legitimate mailer will
publish LMAP data, and that there will be rapid and reliable ways to
tell which new domains are going to send spam.

I sympathize with the feeling that it's urgent to do something.  But
doing something useless is worse than doing nothing at all.

Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com