On Friday 30 March 2007 02:48, Loren Wilton wrote: > > While they don't have to pay for delivery in the same sense as snail-mail > > advertizing, they are bandwidth-limited by the size of the internet. > > Until others increase the bandwidth for their benefit, they can send only > > so many spams.So being able to send 2-3 times as many targeted spams with > > good addresses with the same bandwidth could only be regarded as good for > > them. > > Thought experiment: > > Suppose some Internet uber-government mandated that all hosts publish to a > central server a list of all valid recipient addresses at that host, and > only valid recipient addresses. Suppose further that it was mandated that > the list be kept up to no more than 12 hours out of date as changes > occurred. > > Suppose that this was a gigantic server, and to prevent spam all sending > hosts were mandated to check the list before sending an email to a target > system, and reject the mail locally if the target address was not on the > list. Obviously there would be no reason for the sending host to check the > sender address since it would have to be valid - but mail forwarders would > have to check both the sending and receiving addresses to be sure that > neither was forged. Receiving hosts would likewise be mandated to check > the list and discard the message if the sender did not appear on the list, > or be subject to massive fines. > > Suppose that to reduce resource usage senders and receivers were permitted > to daily download the entire address list from this central server, so that > they could do only a single uber-zone transfer rather than possibly > hundreds of millions of individual requests. Obviously any sending or > receiving machine would have to be able to do this.
I was thinking about a similar idea but one that's a little more distributed and doesn't require sending all one's users' information to a third party. My musings are posted at http://perlstalker.blogspot.com/2007/03/mail-server-registries-and-foreign.html. In a nutshell, I was thinking of basing a system off of OpenID and, possibly, PGP to authenticate and create a web of trust around servers and/or users. [snip] -- Randy Smith http://perlstalker.amigo.net/ "Work is the miracle by which talent is brought to the surface and dreams become reality." - Gordon B. Hinckley
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