[anti-spam-wg@localhost] feasibility of antispam actions

[Markus Stumpf <]

There is a lot of talk about new protocols or new DNS records (RMX like)
and other things.
IMHO one of the biggest handicaps all these suffer from is that they will
only work if they will have a broad acceptance, by ISPs/Freemail Providers,
software vendors and end users.
Also a successful solution IMHO must make it impossible for some competing
ISPs to gain advantage over the others by not applying the policies
and "collect" all customers that find this uncomfortable or stressful
to handle. If those have a large enough market share the solution will
either not work globally or split the Internet in two seperate parts (as
seen from the position of email structure). Both is undesirable.

This means however that global antispam solutions that try to dry the
source and not fiddle with filters at the users end have to be generally
accepted with a consent of appliance by a vast majority of the affected
group.

So I would be interested in a few answers (as probably most of us work
for ISPs I thought this list may be a good starting point for the poll)
and a discussion.

I have listed two points to get it going ;-)

- how much time/money would you spend for a new antispam system
  this would probably be nothing like user spamfilters, so it would be
  hard to make it a product and earn money, but rather be an investment
  in the global Internet email structure.

- depending on the management software you use for zone files and DNS
  how hard would it be to integrate management of new RRs or even
  records like
      example.com IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ptr pi default=softdeny"
  and the semantics involved (taken from http://spf.pobox.com/)
  Would the ISPs accept such a scheme that would probably expand zone
  admin tasks both by time consumed and (technical) fitness needed.

- what would be a realistic timeframe after a released RFC to get
  the new system globally active

It would be great if a discussion would also result in a list of those
questions/topics that could be used to check antispam proposals against.

	\Maex

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