A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Joseph Ashwood]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Kelsey" <kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com>
Subject: CDR: Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?


> At 03:46 PM 5/12/03 -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> >So, what's my reason to accept a "payment in cpu time"?  As best as I
> >can tell, a "payment in cpu time" means that someone *else* doesn't
> >get a payment in cpu time with their spam.  I still get the spam.
>
> The realistic benefit is that you can use something like hashcash as one
of
> your spam filtering rules.  Anyone who is spending 1/2 sec on a reasonable
> machine per e-mail sent isn't likely to be spamming you, because that
won't
> scale up very well for sending out thousands of e-mails at a time.  The
> problem is that until it is widely adopted, it's not a very useful
> additional filter.
>
> There are actually dozens of similar ways to stop nearly all spam, if you
> can deploy them all over the net at once.  But deploying anything all over
> the net at once isn't practical, so instead, each user or ISP tries to
find
> some workable solution for the problem, typically involving changing his
> filtering rules  every few months and spending a minute or two a day going
> through his spam folder, making sure he's not throwing away something
> valuable.

I disagree. If you assume that the entire internet will eventually take up
on the process, start with a rule that says "if it has a hashcash token
don't process the other rules." Obviously at first this rule would be hit
rarely, but a big PR campaign surrounding it would get to people, as would
implementing it in Outlook. Eventually your other rules would be rarely hit,
and you could change them to simply discard. Once it's everywhere you can
begin culling the bad ones. I just don't see where the necessary overhead
bult into the servers will take place, or be justified.
                Joe

Trust Laboratories
Changing Software Development
http://www.trustlaboratories.com


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