Re: [art] whois email

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

[e-mail] writes:
> How do you say an email is authorised  
> or a spammer in a registry that can be queried by the email  
> software/protocols. Spammers can get emails from not only WWW but  
> ISP's and social media like facebook twitter also.whois of email can  
> have only one public field authorised or unauthorised.

Certainly, I'm no expert here, but various difficulties are obvious.
For instance, you don't really need a pure registry, because you could
use an alternative mechanism that is exactly as secure:  the sender
could incorporate into the e-mail headers whatever information the
registry is to carry.  And you can see the latter proposal adds no
security.  The problem is that the registry has to somehow certify
something about the center, rather than just being a place than any
person can put arbitrary data.  (The obvious choices are that the sender
is known to behave well, or that the sender has a particular legal
identity.)  And also the receiver has to be able to verify that the
message was actually sent by the claimed sender (who you would look up
in the registry).  Basically this is the "public key infrastructure"
problem.  A quick check says that there are 41 RFCs with "PKI" in their
titles.  So a great deal of work has been done on that, and I don't
think anyone thinks it has been satisfactorily solved.

Then again, the problem of trust in non-online life has not been solved
either.

Dale