Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

["Clive D.W. Feather" <]

Ragnar Lonn said:
> If the spammers are forced to use a generic label, e.g. a mail
> header saying "X-UCE: Yes", or perhaps include "UCE" in the subject line,
> that would make server side spam filtering a breeze and that would mean
> most major ISPs would filter away to their hearts content,
[...]
> The important thing is to make the spam easily identifiable by
> machines, not just humans. If spammers are allowed to mark their email as
> UCE in any way they see fit, just as long as a human can understand
> it, we may have a problem.

Indeed.

Those ISPs who don't do server-side filtering tend not to do so because of
the complexity of the problem and the risk of false positives. A simple
customer-settable switch saying: "delete all emails with X-UCE: Yes" would
be trivial - the market would soon drive all ISPs to do it.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather       | Email: clive@localhost   | Tel: +44 1733 705000
Regulation Officer       | Home:  clive@localhost |  or: +44 973 377646
London Internet Exchange |                           | Fax: +44 1733 353929