Re: Outlook Express Jams on ONE single SPAM

From: *Vanguard* (no-email_at_no-spam.invalid)
Date: 02/16/04 

Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2004 21:32:56 -0600

> The "From" option is of
> course useless since you ISPs refuse to attach the
> previous header and refuse to track down the spammers
> yourself.

Ever bothered to inspect the Received headers? The From "header" is part of
the sender's *data* composed by them and sent as part of their message in
the DATA command to the SMTP server. It is a required field according to
RFC 2821 (whereas To, CC, Reply-To, and Subject are optional) but unless the
ISP actually interrogates the contents of every message sent then it cannot
be enforced and can be anything the senders wants including just a string of
text which isn't even an e-mail address. How much snooping do you want to
allow by your ISP? Now you scream no control over sent message but later
you'll be screaming about invasion of privacy. The sending SMTP server will
prepend its Received header and that's how you track the source (as far back
as possible) for the spam e-mail. Note that spammers will try to fool
recipients by inserting bogus Received headers so you have to know to to
track through the Received headers and what might flag one as bogus.

ISPs filtering or blocking spam messages would quickly end up in court
battling free speech enthusiasts, like the ACLU. If the ISP offers an
anti-spam feature, they cover their legal *** by making the *recipient*
choose to enable it. The recipient decides to use anti-spam filtering, not
the ISP. Imagine the outcry if the telephone company decided to censor
words from your phone conversations based on their rules and not yours.

> You know YOUR Conspiracy Conglomerate, who
> knowingly lets through "untrusted senders"

That would include you. Have you yet registered on some national database
to uniquely identify yourself in all messages you send? Do you then insert
a unique identifier to link that message to yourself which provides ample
information to find you? Have you bothered to get a security certificate
that can identify you as the sender of that message when you digitally sign
it (and freemail certs from Thawte don't count since they are anonymous
certs until you use their Web-of-Trust to validate)? Do you think ISPs can
immediately switch to forcing users to get a security certificate and only
permit the transfer of e-mails that are digitally signed? Ever been in
business (to stay in business)? Altruism and charity are costly as are nazi
tactics as a result of lost revenue from losing customers.

Since you don't think nothing of the expense involved to provide full
accountability for whatever you say via e-mail then you should be willing to
buy your own fully registered and highly identifying security certificate
and then configure your e-mail client to digitally sign all your messages so
the rest of us can always verify that a message came from you and so we can
track you down. 

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