Hotmail Fighting Junk Mail : Hello MSN Postmaster

Maurits wrote:

Good to see Hotmail has an SPF record.  What's up with Sender ID?  Haven't seen any progress on that front for a while.

IMHO the whole email system needs a good "overhaul"

a while back I was on the IETF anti-spam group mailing list...

I came to the conclusion that it was not going to work.

why?


they kept focusing on the wrong things too often.


for example:  it took ages for folks to start to agree that classifing a message as spam at the mailserver level is almost futile and useless.

why do I say that?

well for example freedom of speech issues, bad classifcation and the like and so on....

and a better angle IMHO is to look at network abuse as the basis.

inother words don't chase down some moron/scam/con based on you view of the "content" of the messages.
in place of that go after them for the way they are taking over your network and abusing your system by flooding it with traffic that 90% (or some large number) of your users do not want.

and also go after them for "Forgery" of the mail.

and modify SMTP to help with that...

today it is very easy to fake the emails headers to look like they come from abc@123.com when it really came form scamer@blackhat.org

A normal user should be able to have some level of "trust" that if the email says it's from uncle bob that he did infact send it.

if the scam artist can't forge the from: to: re-to: and other headers then we don't have to guess at who sent the junk, the sending server can be traced and the sender and/or the senders ISP can be held accoutable for the junk.

then the junk can stop beeing profitable for them.

lot's more can be said.... like chnaging the rules in email clients about html and other mime attachments.
just to name one other big thing.