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

Paul Smith wrote:

> At 09:56 30/01/2004, Florian Weimer wrote:
> 
> >Hector Santos wrote:
> >
> >> - 100% amonymous access with no restrictiions  (where the abuse lies 
> >today)
> >
> >Is this really true?  I don't receive any truly anonymous junk mail.
> 
> Really?
> 
> 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.

Anyway, I don't think this list is the right place to discuss
characteristics of spam.  It's true that you cannot trace someone who
might be accountable with reasonable effort (but what is reasonable in
the light of the negligible cost of a single unwanted email message?), but
this a social issue which is externally imposed onto the current mail
system, and not inherent to it.