FYI - Spam article

[Eric Dantan Rzewnicki]

On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 05:19:16PM +0100, Michele Neylon :: Blacknight Solutions wrote:
> I saw this referenced in it:
> http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/
> You would think that a company the size of Microsoft could at least have got
> a basic fact right, especially when basing an entire project around it!!
> "The introduction of the Penny Black stamp played an important role in the
> reform of the British Postal System during the 1830's"
> Considering that the Penny Black wasn't introduced until 1840 I fail to see
> how the hell it could have had any effect on any postal system in the
> previous decade.
> Mr Michele Neylon
> Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd
> http://www.blacknight.ie/
> Tel. +353 59 9137101
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: MailScanner mailing list
> > [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of John Williams
> > Sent: 16 May 2004 16:19
> > To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> > Subject: [MAILSCANNER] FYI - Spam article
> > Interesting article in Discover this month.
> > http://www.discover.com/issues/jun-04/departments/emerging-technology/
> > John

The article is pushing the idea of making sending spam more costly for
the spammers. They propose both the idea of a penny stamp and the idea
of slowing down the SMTP process by requiring some bs calculations to be
performed on both ends.

This neglects the rising trend for spammers to use zombied home users
PC's to send spam. The spammers aren't necessarily paying anything for
hardware now. A more authentic solution would be to keep easily
compromised systems off the public internet.

This notion of making SMTP cost more in CPU cycles seems really stupid
to me. The spammers won't have to buy more hardware, they'll just use
more zombies to launch easier denial of service attacks against MTA's
cripled by this SSMTP (Slow Stupid Mail Transfer Protocol).

-Eric Rz.

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