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Re: [anti-spam-wg@localhost] Solution to Spam


Please find my responses in the body of the message.

Mark McCarron.


On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 02:35:52PM +0000, Mark McCarron wrote:
> Well, that's very strange. Everyone has suddenly gone VERY quiet. No one
> found any holes in the 'GIEIS' system? For those of you who haven't seen it
> you can go here:
>
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/giza.necropolis

Ok, since you are soliciting comments...

You said:

| There would only be several thousand entries in the database, hardly a
| major thing.

"Several thousand entries" is a _very_ small number. We could
easily have several thousand mailservers just in a single town.
Therefore, it looks like you are planning to have only _major_
organizations listed there, and nothing else. Therefore, a large
number of mail servers will not be listed on the GIEIS.
Of course, the majority of them will not use your tranmission protocol
and keep sending via simple SMTP.

Mark's response:

The list refers to ISPs, not mailservers (the are held in a related database). You obviously haven't been reading the post very carefully. Also, if adopted by major email ISPs and email companies, who exactly are you going to be sending simple SMTP messages too??? It sure as hell won't be to anyone with a 'GIEIS' system protecting them. Let's see if your customer base would be happy with that.



How would you handle those?  We are certainly not going to do
anything to obstacle or just delay those deliveries, because our customer
base does not want that --- not even one minute delays.

Mark's response:

With $12 Billion dollars at stake, I don't think many would care about the opinions of your customer base. Besides, MSN Hotmail has over 200 Million accounts, it has limits on the amount of recipients (currently 50) and it takes a bit longer than 10 seconds to send a new email. So, this arguement is a non-starter, none of the major players are going to be concered with the opinions of smaller companies. The way they will see it, if you go bankrupt because of it, all the better.



Also you said:

| if it exceeds given tolerances the messages are marked as spam and deleted

We are not going to "mark and delete" a message, ever. Any solution
which does that has zero chance to be adopted by us.
We always reject the SMTP transation so that the sender is informed
and can open a case with us if he/she wishes to do so.

Mark's Response:

Current challange response systems do the same. Also, millions of emails each day are filtered and deleted without anyone being informed. Another non-starter.



[ Incidentally, we are quite happy with the way we are blocking spam
  right now, to the point that we can dedicate a significant amount of
  resources to the removal of spammers from the Internet -- a quite
  different job than blocking spam.  So I can consider only deployment
  of slight refinements to our current system at this point. Systems
  like DMP or SPF would certainly be qualified ].
Mark's Response:

You may be happy, but the rest of planet Earth is NOT. That's why Bill Gate's wrote his open letter and why it has dominated tech news for the last while. Nobody is really going to care about smaller ISPs opinions on the matter. It will be upgrade your service, or be left in the wilderness.

Mark McCarron.

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