Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Piet Beertema <]

    	Meanwhile: we need to decide among ourselves how we want
	a spam message to be brought to our attention. I'm open
	to a combo X-UCE: Yes *plus* Subject: [UCE] ...?
    If you put the indication of UCE in the headers inside
    the mail then all mta's has to parse the message to look
    for this mark. 
That's one problem. But furthermore it remains to be seen
whether actual parsing (or "active reading/interpreting")
of the *body* of a message would be legal. But a spammer
might [start to] encrypt his/her messages and include a
key in them to decrypt them. That would render parsing a
message body futile. Or to put it another way: for every
solution there's a problem...

    It is a lot more effective to check a tag in the SMTP/ESMTP
    negotiation...
Sure. And a standardised X-UCE line wouldn't violate other
standards. E.g. RFC822 (see par 4.1, "user-defined-field")
explicitly makes a provision for such lines. But rather
than simply "Yes" (or "No" by default?), the field could
be used to classify UCE messages in a useful manner.


	Piet