Your points are well taken. However, offense and defense have been struggling with each other since life first began to evolve. Every defense will eventually be overcome by a new offense---and every offense will eventually be blocked by a new defense. The ultimate defense against spam is to make it unprofitable. With sufficient economic incentives, spammers will always find a way around any barriers we put up. With few economic incentives, spam will dry up.
Regards, Dick Dowdell
Noel J. Bergman wrote:
I do disagree with the idea that graylisting would just cause
spammers to resend. Two years ago I left a company that was
in the process of changing from an Internet marketing company
into a spammer. I can assure you that each resend diminishes
the profitability of spamming and that if everyone graylisted,
the economics of spamming would change dramatically.
Perhaps. Although, I don't believe that it would be a resend, since a spambot just needs to prep the receiver with HELO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO, without even planning to send data. Unlike outfits like the ASF, for which the impact could be significant, unless they were added to whitelists. The ASF spends over a million e-mails per day, and being widely greylisted would be an issue, since we'd have to spool real messages and retry them, unlike spammers, who could just pre-train the intended victim.
Maybe you've noticed the high proportion of spam that comes from
Eastern Europe and China. I'm sure they're terrified by the
prospect of anti-spam laws passed in the US and the EEC.
Personally, I would support disconnecting from the Internet all countries that don't police spammers. In many ways, that is already happening, as countries like China find their entire IP allocation in DNS block lists.
--- Noel
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