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

On Jan 29, 2004, at 5:56 PM, Paul Lambert wrote:

> Anonymous mail is a valuable service that should be provided by this
> effort and not designed away in our fervor to eliminate spam.
>
>   -- support for anonymous transport and anonymous headers
>

disagree strongly. If you want to design a next generation list server 
that anonymizes addresses, that's great. If you want the underlying 
transport layer to anonymize the transfer of email from one site to 
another, you have usenet. no thanks. Part of the reason we're in the 
trouble we have today is we can't authenticate and authorize (different 
things!) a piece of email and its source. If you allow anonymity to 
wander into this process, you simply create the next hole they're going 
to jump through.

The server to server communications need to be trustable. if you want a 
system that lives on top of that (say, a MLM) that accepts an 
identification, obfuscates it, and redistributes that message with the 
reputation of the MLM instead of the original poster, that's great. 
That's a transfer of reputation, not a removal of one, and you won't 
build a system that can stop the spammer unless there's an audit trail 
of identity (and/or reputation) unbroken to the source.