Meng Wong's Perspectives on Antispam 298
netscoop writes "CircleID is running an interesting blog by Meng Wong, best known as the lead developer of the anti-spam authentication scheme, SPF. While touching on various recent hot issues, Meng has this to say about phishing: 'The final solution to the phishing problem requires that people use a whitelist-only, default-deny paradigm for email. Many people already subscribe to default-deny for IM and VoIP, but there is a cultural resistance to whitelist-only email -- email is perceived as the medium of least reserve. I believe that we must move to a default-deny model for email to solve phishing; at the same time we must preserve the openness that made email the killer app in the first place. The tension between these poles creates a tremendous opportunity for innovation and social good if we get things right, and for shattering failure if we get things wrong.' Right or wrong, definitely worth a read."
Not All People (Score:5, Insightful)
> use a whitelist-only, default-deny paradigm for email."
No, the final solution to the phishing problem requires that stupid, gullible people use a whitelist-only, default-deny paradigm for email.
Of course, that includes most of the human race...
Racist!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not All People (Score:2, Informative)
Take this quiz [mailfrontier.com] to see what I mean.
Nice straw man. There is lots of middle ground... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, when you go to add "Phisher Man" to your white list, your MUA asks you some questions along the way:
* is "Phisher Man" a financial institution?
* is "Phisher Man" a personal friend?
* is "Phisher Man" a merchant?
etc.
By "stupid, gullible people" (Score:2)
If a majority of the users of a class of products, or even a significant minority, are prone to using that product in a way that gives their identities away and makes their finances vulnerable, then the problem is NOT with the users.
It is a design problem, or at best a serious unaddressed education problem.
Blaming the customers when a large number of them repeatedly experience the exact same problem, is simply scapegoating the customers for the pr
Obligatory spam checklist (Score:2)
Re:Not All People (Score:3, Informative)
Default deny is dumb. (Score:5, Insightful)
The banks have your home address and your phone number.
The only reason they use email is because it is incredibly cheap and allows them to attach advertising to their messages.
If the banks were responsible for any losses due to phishing, you'd see them drop email overnight. Once the cost exceeds the benefits, it's gone.
Re:Default deny is dumb. (Score:2)
They're being smart. (Score:2)
Once they do start using it, they lose that edge.
Something that has never happened before attracts a lot more of you attention than something that happens frequently. Something that happens frequently, but is a bit different this time, may be missed.
Re:They're being smart. (Score:2)
All banks I have been with use physical mail or messages sent through the online banking.
Re:They're being smart. (Score:2)
Re:Default deny is dumb. (Score:2)
FOr example something like:
"We have detected an anomily with your acount, please contact your local bracnh immediatly" is pretty harmless.
Send "We detected an anomoly with acount number 4856846353a34, please call 180005556565" is not harmless
Or even:"Please check you account for important information" and don't provide a link.
Re:Default deny is dumb. (Score:2)
Nothi
Re:Default deny is dumb. (Score:3, Informative)
I deal with my bank via ATMs, direct deposit and e-mail and that is the way I prefer it.
Charles
Re:Default deny is dumb. (Score:4, Funny)
I would ne interested to know what bank allows only a PO Box for an account. I have some friends who say they need to get 15,000,000 into the country since a forgotten reletive of mine died.
Re:Default deny is dumb. (Score:3, Interesting)
Use an address of a relative with the same last name or a PO box for the initial correspondence and then put in a "moved, no forwarding address" card. Voila! No address on record. Until they try and mail you something, they'll never know. I had an account with a Cre
You don't need email for that. (Score:2)
There, almost all the functionality and none of the phishing issues.
Snail mail is also easy to fake (Score:3, Interesting)
However very few people understand security or the distinction beween their computer and what's on the internet. To many it is just "the computer" and part of "t
Re:Snail mail is also easy to fake (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just the fact banks use it. (Score:2)
The problem with the whitelist solution isn't just that banks and businesses use email to communicate, it's that they don't tell their customers what email address they use to send mail, and most use many. Take eBay for example. I get emails from outbidnotice@ebay, member@ebay, status@ebay, ect. and there's no reason to. Why can't all the emails just come from user-alert@ebay or some other such address and let the subject lines tell me what the email is regarding alone. I
If I may expand upon your expansion... (Score:2)
It's like certain banks are doing everything they can to make it easy to defraud their customers.
Re:It's not just the fact banks use it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's not just the fact banks use it. (Score:2)
Yes, the phishers will all start to spoof the One True Address of the business, but if I'm using a whitelist then I'll only recieve those spoof emails on the account the business norma
Gee, What Would You Do In The Case of A Rape? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hm. First time I ever heard someone suggest that, in order to stop criminals, you have to punish their victims.
I mean, I know we have a lot of "whack" social-engineering running around these days masquerading as "wisdom," but that one sure brought me up short.
Hmmm (Score:2)
Inclusive, they are not, but they seem to be quite effective.
Once somebody arrives at a smart card used to implement DRM (quick: trademark DRMstick), society will transition from 'sheep' to 'card-carrying sheep'.
Re:Hmmm (Score:2)
Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end, it is at times absolutely necessary that complete strangers can contact us without prior warning. If we don't have email for this role, then we need something similar to replace it.
Re:Meh. (Score:4, Funny)
Now, I'm no historian, but I've heard that in the past there was a government provided courier service which would deliver messages on paper for a small fee. Perhaps that would work if we reimplemented it?
Although, being serious, this lacks the (potential) anonymity of email, and involves giving out your physical address. Maybe we can persuade the postal service to provide free, (almost-)anonymous PO Box numbers?
Re:Meh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Meh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah right.
Re:Meh. (Score:3, Informative)
One method is to have whitelisted mail, and bounce others with a message asking you to do something difficult to automate, eg pointing to a web page where they can type in a message, maybe with a captcha.
Phishing is easy to recognize (Score:5, Informative)
But I still wonder why mail providers don't scan the typical phishing mails (PayPal and eBay) and check whether the links point to ebay or paypal's site or some obscure IP.
I'm pretty sure that checking such typical phishing mails for their authenticity this way would help getting inboxes rid of it. My two cents..
Re:Phishing is easy to recognize (Score:2, Insightful)
I recived a phishing email the other domain, the Phishers 1) registered a domain that fitted into other domains the bank had, had the complete site down pat, had an ssl cert, the only thing that gave the page away as a phishing page, was that the extenstion was
Re:Phishing is easy to recognize (Score:2, Insightful)
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1118 [sans.org]
Snippets of your credit card info (the first part of the card number is usually the same for a issuer's customer base)
Non-obfuscated links (not a link to a
Valid SSL certificate
Valid links to other credentialing organizations
Most of us are aware of the typical phishing attempt. Message from your bank, paypal, ebay, etc asking you to log in to "veri
The solution isn't only technological (Score:3, Insightful)
For your example a machine will need to know the email is supposely coming from a bank, who deceive that better will pass.
From the white list point of view, it won't work if you expect to receive emails from any major company and from people you don't know yet.
You cou
Re:Phishing is easy to recognize (Score:2)
Sadly, we're not the target demographic for phishing attempts. If we were, my inbox probably would have stopped filling up with these emails long ago as they would have almost immediately ceased to become profitable!
I still wonder why legitimate emails from places like PayPal aren't digitally signed. It probably wouldn't make a difference for the end user as I still feel most digital signing stuff for email isn't anywhere near th
Not workable (Score:3, Insightful)
Too much trouble (Score:5, Interesting)
My proposal:
Charge 3 cents per letter. One cent goes to the ISP sending the mail, one cent to the ISP receiving the mail, and one cent to the recipient.
The ISP on either end would credit/debit the sender/receiver's account.
And watch the spam disappear.
Re:Too much trouble (Score:2, Insightful)
For those of you playing at home that can think beyond your cube, this is a bad thing.
otoh, charging after the first 1000 email per day may be a good compromise. Meaninging, if you don't have a CC on file, then it won't let you send more.
Re:Too much trouble (Score:2, Insightful)
The ISP on either end would credit/debit the sender/receiver's account.
And watch the spam disappear.
If it could be done, you might be right. Even so, the game would then change to, "How do I steal all those pennies?".
Won't work (Score:3, Insightful)
This same problem applies to most source-based mail authentication systems.
Nobody sends spam from their own server any more. That gets the spammer shut down, fast.
Never base your solution... (Score:2)
Once you start down that road email will become a corporate revenue source and the abuse will start.
Re:Too much trouble (Score:2)
Also watch mailing lists disappear. Oh, and look how the spammers that are now using zombies to send spam now use them to send email to their account so they can make even more money while doing even more damage. I think you could check most of the options on the standard "your approach will not work" checklist.
Re:Too much trouble (Score:2)
Problem #2: I get involved in some projects for which we send a LOT of email back and forth between
Re:Too much trouble (Score:2)
Then throw your computer out the window and cancel your Internet service. Problem solved much more efficiently. I hate this attitude that change is always good even if you don't know what you're doing. Remember, things can always be worse, even if you think they can't.
Get lost (Score:2)
I do use SPF and other methods to turn away crap at the smtp server (I see by the readout on my screen that I'm currently getting 0.647 emails per second; maybe two of those in a day will look genuine enough to be accepted by the server) but default deny is functionally the same as saying you don't use email.
TWW
Considering IP blocking tactics, it's pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
But lately I've been hitting a different problem which totally destroys the point of e-mail in many cases for me. That is, idiotic sys admins who firewall out entire IP blocks for, seemingly, no reason.
Just because someone several machines down the co-lo rack let their machine get hacked is no reason for mail server administrators to *firewall out* entire ranges of IP addresses. Lately I've seen some ridiculous behavior where users of the other mail server can't even e-mail people on MY server because the block is two-way! So I end up with users complaining that only certain e-mail addresses appear unmailable (because only a small percentage of sysadmins are stupid enough to block entire classes) but it's still a major PITA that makes e-mail useless for many people. The worst part is when you complain to these sys admins/ISPs, many of them proclaim innocence and believe they have no blocks.. but it's their upstream provider, etc, etc.
I'm beginning to think that encouraging people to migrate over to systems like 'GMail for your domain' and the like are going to be the way to go. At least Google has teams of people working 24/7 keeping their machines whitelisted. Having the US government able to subpoena your private information is the least of your worries, as long as you can actually e-mail the people you need to.
And no, schemes like SPF do not help this problem, since if they're blocking IP ranges outright at their firewall, nothing can break through that except mail proxying (which I've been considering).
Re:Considering IP blocking tactics, it's pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
Whitelists simply don't address this issue.
Re:Considering IP blocking tactics, it's pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely: it's clearly right to punish people for being associated with wrongdoers, even though the people in question may have no way to determine what wrong is being done or why they are being punished. In addition, it's clearly right to punish people for associating indirectly with wrongdoers, such as by being the customers of the same ISP as someone whose computer is hacked and used to send spam. Obviously every
p2p whitelists anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
If someone tries to email you, and they aren't on your whitelist but they are on the whitelist of someone who *is* on your whitelist, maybe let it through or at least give it some plus points for the filter based on how many degrees away they are.
Re:p2p whitelists anyone? (Score:2)
Instead just use authentication. Not on your whitelist? it sends an email back asking if you are a real person. At which point it puts you on a temp list until you confirm or deny they email.
Re:p2p whitelists anyone? (Score:2)
My ISP does exactly that if you have your anti-spam setting at High. Unless the sender's on your whitelist, it puts the message in a "suspect" folder and emails back a request for authentication. You have (I think; I don't bother with it myself.) 72 hours or so to reply, after which it's presumed spam.
Re:p2p whitelists anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
From the website:
LOAF is a simple extension to email that lets you append your entire address book to outgoing mail message without compromising your privacy. Correspondents can use this information to prioritize their mail, and learn more about their social networks. The LOAF home page is at http://loaf.cantbedone.org. [cantbedone.org]
Or maybe just don't click on obvious emails (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at it as the digital equivalent of the Survival Of The Fittest.
Re:Or maybe just don't click on obvious emails (Score:2)
Education (Score:2)
Whitelist only (Score:2)
Some of it would get through, and the people who'd get it would be far more likely to trust it, as their expectation of trust would be higher.
Similarly, if you get on a plane in the US, the window-dressing security probably makes you less safe: resources are pointlessly consumed when they could be spent on real
I don't agree. (Score:2)
The nigerian scams have been well covered, receiv
What about n00bs? (Score:4, Insightful)
He only just got a PC, and has been oblivious to anything computer related for all his life. Suddenly, he gets a PC, an internet account, and he's told to go off and have fun.
Seriously, I sometimes wish you needed a license to operate a computer.
Re:I don't agree. (Score:2)
I think sometimes we underestimate our users.
I am not sure how you meant that, in sarcasm?
Users will cut and paste a userlist from Exchange into a questionable site and with in days spam doubles for everyone and the user is innocent? I got hundreds of stories like this.
It is why I asked to be off of the "public" work Exchange system.
There are inexpensive solutions that work well and cause spammers grief but you need management support to do it as some user is going to whine that he can't get mail from
Spam is a social problem, not a technical one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
Here's a solution that would work if we had a real leader as president of the U.S., and not someone who is only interested in benefiting the rich.
The president could, during a scheduled speech, ask people never to buy anything advertised with unsolicited email. He could talk about several ways such email is dishonest.
It could be arranged that Oprah Winfrey ask people not to buy things from spam. Religious leaders could ask their congregations.
This kind of solution has already worked. Everyone in the world knows to wash their hands; that has become part of human culture. We need to make anti-spam part of human culture.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
Re:Spam is a social problem, not a technical one. (Score:2)
The less people spend on spamvertized junk, Nigerian scams, phishing and other fraud, the more they have to spend on legitimate merchandise and services, often sold by business owned by rich people. Thus, cutting down on spam benefits the rich.
I meant the corrupt rich. (Score:2)
I didn't mean the good rich, who earned their money honestly, I meant the corrupt rich, like spammers and illegal lobbyists.
Spam is an economic problem, not a social problem (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's an economic problem, thus the solution is an economic one. As long as it costs essentially nothing for the spammer to blast out a hundred million email messages, he or she will continue to do so, regardless of the social considerations. Make it cost even a tenth of a cent per recipent, and you'll reduce the probem by more than three orders of magnitude. But realistically, there's no reason why the payment sho
Re:Spam is an economic problem, not a social probl (Score:2)
I do however completely agree with your statement that it is an economic problem for the same reasons you've outlined. I wish I hadn't used my mod points already, because I don't think the GP post is very accurate and it is modded pretty highly.
Asking people not to do something would probably just draw more attention to it. If the president got up and talked about spam enco
Re:Spam is a social problem, not a technical one. (Score:2)
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
This I equate with. Spam isn't so much different than having mobs on the street robbing people or too many DWI drivers on the road.
Here's a solution that would work if we had a real leader as president of the U.S., and not someone who is only interested in benefiting the rich.
Although the president of the USA is a very powerful person, free internet communications has a country like China, with guns, going amiss. The
Re:Spam is a social problem, not a technical one. (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, ummmmmmmmm, was I supposed to get a memo?
KFG
Re:Spam is a social problem, not a technical one. (Score:3, Informative)
Comparing this to washing hands is probably the best point you have. Like washing hands, it's regularly drummed into people's heads, and just as regularly goes ignored by a minimum of 30% of people [cleaning101.com].
As for your idea of influential people decrying spam, it's pretty weak, since it assumes total obedience in those influenced. Marital infidelity is regularly condemned by Oprah and probably 99% of religious leaders (and usually by the president, although we should make an exception at least in the case of the la
We need SERVER authentication, not user (Score:3, Interesting)
Anytime an e-mail is sent, the receiver checks to see if they're in this "master database", if not, their mail is dumped. Obviously, you'd have some kind of public key encryption going on to prevent spoofing.
Now, creating a central authority for mail servers would be difficult, but it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to change things on the CLIENT side.
As for those of you saying "But I want to run my OWN mailserver! Why should I have to pay! And what if I want to run it in a way that doesn't meet the standards!".
Well...fuck off. You don't need to run your own mailserver. There's just no valid reason to do so.
Re:We need SERVER authentication, not user (Score:4, Insightful)
Many hosting companies can fit 300+ clients onto one server. It's not uncommon for someone to signup and start using the account for spam. Most hosting companies take a very strict stance on this, and will immediately close the account. But spammers know they'll get a bit of spamming in before they're stopped.
The problem is that the hosting company could show that their server wasn't being used for spam, but there's nothing stopping someone from beginning to use it that way. Not only would your method still allow spam, but it would, in theory, mark the spam as being entirely legitimate e-mail. Now imagine the e-mail wasn't spam, but phishing e-mails, marked as having come from an approved server.
In addition, a server could 'turn' bad. I could register a server, and for a month or whatnot show you that I wasn't a spammer. One day I could just start spewing spam. $25/year really wouldn't be an impediment to too many spammers.
Plus, some random organization (the e-mail certifiers) would be making a boatload of money, and would essentially have complete control over who could send mail and who couldn't. (Technically, people could ignore this whitelist. Just like you could, technically, ignore the existing
And there are plenty of valid reasons for running your own mailserver. My home ISP used to suck. My school now uses Lotus, which seems to not allow POP/IMAP access, and insists on a bloated e-mail client that really doesn't work well in anything but IE. (Even though it's supposed to.) There are spam filters, but they're not catching any of my spam; in fact, the only mail that it ever caught was a couple messages from one of my professors. Is this not a valid reason to run my own mailserver?
I'm sorry, but I really don't feel that this idea is as good in reality as it looks on paper.
Re:We need SERVER authentication, not user (Score:2)
Yeah, you could still have individual USERS sign-up for e-mail accounts, and use those to send spam, but those accounts can easily be deactivated. Plus, how many spammers are going to pay for a new e-mail account every day, just to send out a few thousand spa
Re:We need SERVER authentication, not user (Score:2)
Says you.
Is that really what we want the Internet to be? I thought the idea was to make information flow as freely (as in unhindered) and reliably as possible? Now you are proposing that there are services I CANNOT/SHOULD NOT run on the 'Net because YOU don't think I have a valid reason to do so?
How's this for a valid reason to run my own mail server: I own a business and I want the flexibility to configure things b
Re:We need SERVER authentication, not user (Score:3)
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the
Wait a minute (Score:2)
Where have a heard this before?
SPAM for Dummies, Vol 2 (Score:2, Interesting)
It provides useful service for legitimate mail (first contact) while making spam stand out even more than already.
The smartest thing a spammer could do is send out a fake first mail, but then the user can already blacklist them.
GMAIL certainly could implement it, while Yahoo and Hotmail probably have the capabilities if they'll admit to it.
It demands nothing of the enduser other than
Banks should not use email (Score:5, Insightful)
A big education campaign would also help (i.e. "never trust emails claiming to be from this bank" or "only trust emails claiming to come from this bank if the digital signature was valid" along with "never follow links in any emails claiming to be from this bank" and "If the email is legitimate, the same information will be available by logging into the online banking and checking the messages")
If I got an email claiming to be from my bank, I would probobly delete it. If the information was geniune, it will appear on my online banking and/or a physical letter too.
I knew someone named Meng Wong in college (Score:2)
It Really Isn't That Simple (Score:3, Insightful)
If I had a default-deny system, I would need know what email address I would be mailed from, which I don't think they were organized enough to know ("someone loosely affiliated on some level with MITRE" isn't a valid whitelist criteria). When the emails did go out, many people hit "reply-all" and I was included in the discussion. I would need a client that was smart enough to figure out that I wanted to receive any replies to those messages.
Then there is the ever-present problem of "oh yeah, everyone, I switched email addresses" after someone has moved. It would require the foresight of everyone to send those notifications *before* moving or keeping an offline contact list.
Two other instances that come to mind are that a while back a senior engineer emailed me from his cell phone to tell me he wasn't coming in that day along with some brief instructions. Having never received email from that address, using a default-deny there wouldn't have been a good way for him to reach me at that time. I also have a bit of a website. That gets occasional email, and that is generally email I want to see.
Some of the things that make email attractive to me--open communication, many people can reach me from a variety of sources, people who don't know me can reach me with legitimate reason--are the very things that make it attractive to phishers, spammers, and scam artists. There is no good solution to the latter without removing a large part of the utility of the medium.
Greylisting (Score:2)
Greylisting is doing pretty good for me at the moment.
Once the spammers adapt to it, and they will, I'll have to find something else.
One thing I'd like to do is to use SPF rules to identify the legitimate e-mail servers of some domains so that I can whitelist them to get around the greylist. The main reason for this is that if they are using RFC compliant servers, the e-mail is going to be delivered anyway. Except for Nigerian spams from hotmail.com, the big problem is zombie machines in people's homes.
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not usually one to say "RTFA," but the majority of the comments right now have nothing to do with the article.
I haven't been spammed in years. (Score:2)
Simple:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/16/13579/3506 [kuro5hin.org]
I track my email carefully, I use unique email aliases for all the websites I visit, I use special aliases for the mailing lists I'm on, I provide images to interpret for people trying to contact me, and I give out my "real" email address to close friends and family *only*.
I haven't been sent a spam that I couldn't immediately block--permanently--ever since I implemented this scheme. It was bliss turning off bogofilter for the last ti
Re:I haven't been spammed in years. (Score:3, Funny)
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the
Self-managed user aliases (Score:2)
The user can create new, or targetted email alias from that base, say foo.slashdot at dreezel.org. If the user is very educated, they can create access lists for each specialized address. Otherwise, the aliases are default-ac
Greylisting is the answer (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't implement even a five minute greylist on yur mailserver, stop what you are doing and go implement it now [puremagic.com].
A Radical Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
We should change the way e-mail works from the ground up. Currently, the sender's server will send the message to the recipient server where it waits until the client downloads the message. Instead of this, an interesting idea would be to have the sender server HOLD the e-mail message and simply send a notice to the recipient's server that a message awaits. When the client connects, depending on his software configuration, he will download the message from the sender's server or click on a link to go download the message from the sender's server.
What does this accomplish? We add the ability to flag messages as spam or virii. Depending on the sender's server's configuration, if a message gets too many flags, it will block the message from being downloaded in the future. Here's an example of this in action. Spammer sends out 100 messages for V1agR@. The 1st, 5th, and 7th readers are dilligent and mark the message as spam. The server's threshold is 3 warnings and then deletes the message. The message never gets to recipients 8 to 100. The user's account is suspended, and the spammer becomes drastically less effective.
There are other positive side effects to this scheme. Internally, my company will send out big files to one another. Instead of always using a server share, some people e-mail these big files to multiple recipients. If one person e-mails a 20MB file to 10 people, that'll be 200MB of consumed space for the recipients' servers. In a sender-hosted e-mail system, it will still just be 20MB.
Drawbacks to this scheme? Let's say the spammer sets up his own e-mail server and sends out spam from that. Recipients flag it, but the sender's server is configured to ignore the flags. If this were to happen, the spam is still not as effective because the recipient only wlil get a notification that mail exists. The notification would probably be limited to something like 128 characters of text for a subject. The sender's address can't be as easily spoofed because it still must be able to resolve to the sender's server. And better yet, if the ISP is cooperative, reports of this type of abuse to the ISP could lead to the ISP taking legal/criminal actions against violators of their Terms of Service. If the sender wants their message sent, they need to keep their server connected to the ISP, thus making it a lot easier to physically trackdown. If the ISP doesn't care, then we simply add the ISP to a blacklist.
Another side effect is that now the recipient needs to rely on both his e-mail server and the sender's server to be online to get a message, but this should be trivial. Also the server must retain the message for long enough time for the recipient to download the message. This should also be trivial, and in my opinion, it's better to put the onus on the sender instead of the recipient. For example, if the recipient goes on vacation for a few days and comes back to find his mailbox quota is full and he lost a lot of messages, it is quite annoying, and this proposed solution will not have that problem.
The biggest drawback is that this is a fairly major overhaul to the e-mail system. It would probably have to be done in phases where there is one phase that most servers support both types of e-mail protocols. I think it's worth the effort.
if you run a mail server (Score:2)
http://www.acme.com/mail_filtering/ [acme.com]
its not the be all and end all, but there are several very very good ideas.
OAM
Fidonet anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't we use this model? Introduce a backbone network of mutually trusting certificate authorities, and require all mail to be signed with a valid certificate. It is the backbone member's responsibility to take due actions in case anyone having their certificate starts sending spam (revoke certificate, prosecute the user, etc), or else the member will be kicked off the backbone. The backbone member may delegate the right to issue certificates, but the responsibility still holds.
This scheme would make the backbone members know who their users and child authorities are, and prosecute the violators. You would still be able to have a free anonymous mailbox to receive mail, but the sender identity would always be revealed, and you would always be responsible for what you're sending.
Unfortunately it's obvious that if we retain an open non-whitelisting scheme, we HAVE to give up anonymity to prevent spam. There should be an easy way to find, block and prosecute the violators, in all other cases spam will continue.
I've always wanted this. Sort of. (Score:2)
The Phshing problem (Score:2)
What we really need is a method other then a simple password to authenticate. We need real a real bidirectional authentication method that's easy to use.
Here's one idea: Give the user something like a USB thumbdrive, you could even make it Bluetooth, it doesn't matter because a user would need to type in a password, and all sessions with it would be encr
Better authentication schemes (Score:3, Insightful)
As phishing scams get more elaborate, even saavy users such as myself have to go through complicated steps just to verify the identity of a website. i.e. whois, verification of SSL certificates, etc. No average user should have to become a detective in order to verify that www.chase.com belongs to the same Chase bank that issues his credit card. Especially when it's an URL such as chasenetaccesss.com or chaseonlinebanking.com, etc.
The point is to make faking or forging the identity of ownership much more difficult than the current state of affairs, which is deciding whether or not to believe that www.ebaysecurityreinstatement.com is a valid eBay website or not.
SPF - a solution looking for a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
SPF is a failure. Unlike the submitter, its proponents don't even pretend that it's an anti-spam method (there are more spam messages with SPF than ham), focussing instead on its authentication promise. Now it seems even Meng has abandoned that as being worth anything if the FUSSP [rhyolite.com] is whitelist-only. Imagine that - saving email by destroying it!
Email has been a phenomenal success because it costs close to zero to contact people with whom you otherwise would never easily be able to communicate. UBE is a problem precisely because it costs close to zero to contact people with whom you otherwise would never easily be able to communicate. Any FUSSP that destroys either of those two qualities, cost and ubiquity, is a cure that's worse than the disease.
Re:The simple solution... (Score:2)
bzzzzzzzzzt wrong! (Score:2)
I've gotten mails that are completely blank. They have no message, ANYTHING. Why do you think a spammer would send those?
An approach I'd choose to solve SPAM is to ask for the message first, check if the user exists later. This way the mail server could do some filtering and post a "recipient not found" if it's spam
Re:bzzzzzzzzzt wrong! (Score:3, Informative)
I run my own mail server and have it set to do things like:
*REQUIRE* SSL/TLS + AUTH to send/receive mail if you have an account on my system
Bounce, as if my address doesn't exist, any non-whitelisted e-mail
ClamAV, updated twice daily, just to be extra safe
-Charles
A variant which works well (Score:2)
Of course, this assumes that the in
Re:The simple solution... (Score:2)
But I've gathered is that someone I know got a virus or whatnot that started harvesting addresses and sent them off to spammers. This is the simplest way I could think of that this could happen. (I now get spam at some really obsc
Re:The simple solution... (Score:2)
It's brute forced email guessing.
aaaaaa@domain.com
aaaaab@domain.com
aaaaac@domain.com
etc.
If it's there, they'll find it.
(this all coming from wildly separate IP addresses on spam zombie networks distributed all over the planet but controlled by one mothership)
Once they hit one, they'll use bugs to see if it gets viewed, bounces, and other more ways to find out if it is there. Or, they just brute force the actual spam and it gets delivered along with a huge noise to signal ratio
Re:Wrong or Wong? (Score:2)
Bayes filters do not achieve `99.9%' (Score:4, Informative)
That said, filters can remove 98% of spam with about 0.1% false positives, which makes them pretty useful. Most, but not all, of those 1-in-1000 false positives are marginal anyway.
If you're interested in doing your own tests, there's a free toolkit and corpus with 92,000 messages.