Philip Prindeville wrote:
And then had hosts participating in this scheme generate outgoing mail as:
X-Yes-Its-Really-Me: XYZZY 123 456 (C) Copyright 2006 Redfish Solutions,
LLC"
and uses the presence of this copywritten key to match the appropriate
string
in the DNS as proof that the sender is who he says he is.
This sounds a lot like the original scheme for Habeas <www.habeas.com>,
which used a copyrighted haiku that licensed senders could put in their
email headers. Habeas would make sure they weren't spammers, filters
could check for the haiku as a sign of non-spam, and when spammers used
the haiku, they'd take them to court for copyright infringement.
It worked for maybe a year. Then spammers started forging it on a
massive scale, using botnets so Habeas couldn't just add the IPs to
their list of known infringers (and had a hard time tracking them down).
In the end, they abandoned the haiku and switched to an IP-based
whitelist.
--
Kelson Vibber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>
