Re: The Real Problem

On 12-12-13 04:18 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 05:43:58AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
>> There have been a lot of proposals to "replace SMTP", but none have
>> come anywhere near close to demonstrating sufficient utility to
>> motivate people to bear the enormous switching costs from the existing
>> deployed system.
> 
> Just because this hasn't be stated explictly enough this week outside
> of Dubai, let me say the problem is that the underlying lookup
> mechanism isn't robust enough.  If we only knew who it was doing the
> lookups, we could use the existing legal systems to solve these
> issues.  Therefore, all we need to is replace DNS; SMTP can stay where
> it is in the stack.

Knowing who looked at a phone book doesn't tell you who is making the
phone ring in the middle of the night.

Especially if its possible to copy the phone book.

And even if you did know, what makes you think the existing legal system
will always be able to help?

_Most_ western legal systems already have laws that pertain to just
about the full gamut of what spammers do.  The difficulty is in
enforcing it - either getting LE interested, or having a sufficient ROI
to do it in civil law.

Eg: spoofing my email address is something actionable.  But it'd be at
_least_ $25K upfront to get a lawyer doing something.  And if it was
outside of Canada, start multiplying that ...