> -----Original Message-----
> From: Noel J. Bergman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Friday, April 16, 2004 4:12 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: RE: Mailing lists hiding sender's address?
>
>
> > A little obfuscation goes a long way. Look at our subscription mechanism
> to
> > mailing lists. It is trivially easy to defeat, but as far as I know no
> one
> > has yet subscribed to one of our lists to spam us.
>
> Actually, that part is not so easy because it requires them to have a
> valid mailbox in order to complete the process.  Spammers don't like to be
> seen.
>
> The real problem would be if they started to use widespread spoofing of
> valid subscriber addresses, e.g., sending lots of e-mail as you to lists
> on which you are subscribed.
>
> The solution is to require digital certificates to authenticate identity.
> All e-mail would need to carry them or be considered spam a priori.
> Stefano uses a digital signature on every message, but since he uses PGP
> MIME instead of S/MIME, my MUA treats it a bit oddly.  I rarely bother to
> sign my messages, but signed messages could be verified by the server as
> part of its filtering.

I notice you signed that one. ;-)

Signed messages cause problems on gmane, at least when using Outlook Express
as a newsreader, and I would guess with other newsreaders as well. The
problem is that gmane obfuscates the sender itself, so that the sender and
signer don't match, and you get a "Security Warning", with a message like
this:

The digital ID's e-mail address does not match sender's
 Signer: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

You can still read the message, but the value of the signature is negated.

--
Martin Cooper


>       --- Noel
>



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