[lug] email mystery

[Kirk Rafferty]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 12:47:47AM -0700, D. Stimits wrote:
> With all the anti-spam laws starting to either show up or be discussed
> by various government bodies, it would seem that a law needs to be added
> that says commercial advertisement is deemed spam if such tricks are
>8<...

Laws are hard to enforce with regards to SMTP spam.  In the case of this
spam, you'd have to try to enforce a US law in Japan.

It would be much more effective to stop the flow of spam at the source.
Closing down relays is the first line of defense.  Refusing messages from
open relays is another step (which RSS and RBL address).  Another attempt
being made on the spam front is the adoption of RFC2476, Message Submission
Agent.  You can find out how Sendmail is implementing it at
http://sendmail.net/rfc2476.shtml.  Here's a snippet:

The goal? First, to prevent spammers and unauthorized
users from launching messages into your Internet mail
system by tightening up that first conversation between,
say, Eudora and sendmail. An MSA would require more
fully formed headers to make authentication and tracking
of the message possible. It may have extra error codes,
such as "message violates system policy." It may require
authentication (see RFC 2554) before talking to the
MUA. 

-k