Re: Why are we here? What are our goals?

At 12:31 30/01/2004, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > The vast majority of the spam I receive has anonymous headers/envelope
> > information. By that I don't mean there isn't a 'From:' address, just that
> > the From: address bears no resemblance to the real sender, and can't be
> > traced back to them.
>
>If you throw away all the dial-up junk and Kornet/Chinanet/Hinet/...,
>most of the remaining junk mail comes with authenticated, valid sender
>addresses (Hotmail, Yahoo and recently Freenet, a German webmail
>provider).  The owners are as well authenticated as possible on the
>current Net, under the given business models.

Exactly, you're having to ignore lots of unauthenticated junk to come up 
with authenticated junk.

You can find the IP address of the original sender of a message quite 
easily, but relating that back to a user is a lot harder. Even if you 
contact the ISP who owns the IP address, I bet many would find it time 
consuming to find the actual user from the IP address at a point in time, 
and some may not be able to do it at all.

That's why I believe that having a stricter form of authentication would be 
useful - so the ISP will be able to locate the relevant sender's user 
account from the email trace info. Either it could be that the sender's 
email address must be permitted by the account details, or that the 
authentication information is encoded into the trace info somehow. (This 
wouldn't necessarily preclude anonymous mailing, just 'pseudonymous' mailing)


Paul				VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
[email protected]			http://www.pscs.co.uk/