How accountability helps

On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 09:39:31PM -0000, John Levine wrote:
|  People who run large mail
| systems tell me that vast amounts of spam comes from hijacked PCs
| through ISPs' real outgoing mail gateways.  If ISPs want to deal with
| the hijacking problem, they can do it now by looking at the mail
| traffic through their own servers.  They don't need LMAP for that. nor
| will LMAP make it any more likely that that do so.
| 
| So other than an increase in "accountability", for some vague
| definition thereof, how will LMAP deter spam, or make it easier to
| call spam sources to account, or otherwise address any of the large
| e-mail problems?  What am I missing?

If we can get that spam path to use the ISP's domain name in the
outbound mail, I really think those ISPs will start clamping down.

That is a long-term goal; the steps that lead to that goal include:
- getting that spam path to not use my ISP's domain name.
- getting that spam path to not use any other reputable domain name.

I believe there is a positive adoption dynamic there; reputable domains
don't want to be named in spam.  In just a few months SPF has seen
tremendous grassroots response with many thousands of domains
publishing.