[108132] in Cypherpunks
RE: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists [CP]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Gutknecht (vw))
Fri Feb 5 17:47:14 1999
From: "Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" <VW@i405.com>
To: "'Bill Stewart'" <bill.stewart@pobox.com>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1999 14:19:38 -0800
Reply-To: "Stephen Gutknecht (vw)" <VW@i405.com>
Bill and others,
This is like saying that painting yellow lines in the center of the road has
no point. People can still drive over the line.
It isn't that we need a PERFECT solution, my suggestion was that requiring a
phrase in the first three lines of the message body would eliminate MOST
(95%) of the SPAM on this list and others that don't require subscriber
addresses to match for a post.
The "require sender to be a subscriber" approach does work very well on the
dozens of lists that I'm on. It sure as heck isn't hard to overcome, but
spammers have selected not to.
My proposal is for lists like this one that DON'T require membership address
to match for a post. It would work, just because it doesn't deal with the
fringe cases doesn't mean it isn't a real solution.
Yes, in two or three years spammers may all have a feature to overcome this,
I doubt it. And that misses the point that e-mail will be different then
too, a master directory of people (aka phone book) and their public key
better be in place by then :)
Stephen Gutknecht
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Stewart [mailto:bill.stewart@pobox.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 1999 6:17 PM
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Idea to eliminate most spam on mailing lists [CP]
The simple "tag the Subject: line with the magic string"
is a start, since each list would presumably want a different one,
but that's too easy to program around - there are already
spamwarez that personalize the message body with "Dear <recipientname>",
and it's trivial to add personalized Subject lines.
