Re: Forbes: Pay up

On Thursday, Jul 3, 2003, at 00:46 Europe/London, Roy S. Walker wrote:

> "Charge the sender" was discussed yesterday at the famous 'spam 
> summit' at the house of commons in
> the UK.  View seems to be: this will further encourage the practice of 
> spammers to gain control of
> legitimate email servers, with the intention of sending out spam from 
> an 'authorised' sender (the
> recent piece on the BBC re British Airways as a source of spam 
> refers..). This idea will NOT work
> in practice.  Naive innocents would pick up the charge.

Actually just a factual correction - the article was slightly 
misleading. The spam came direct from super-zonda, it was the web site 
that was being proxied through BA-Travel's web site. Your point remains 
though.

Solve the problem of email forgery (which is required for the "charge 
for email" model) and you've solved the spam problem (or at the very 
least we can go back to just using blocklists).

Matt.