RE: [Asrg] seeking comments on new RMX article

"Eric D. Williams" <eric@infobro.com> Mon, 05 May 2003 22:38 UTC

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From: "Eric D. Williams" <eric@infobro.com>
To: "'asrg@ietf.org'" <asrg@ietf.org>
Subject: RE: [Asrg] seeking comments on new RMX article
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Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 16:39:48 -0400
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On Monday, May 05, 2003 1:20 PM, Vernon Schryver 
[SMTP:vjs@calcite.rhyolite.com] wrote:

> Yes, but that's got nothing to do with getting spammers into the open
> and nothing to do with RMX or other mail virtue certificates until
> the mail from at least 80% of the Internet or 400,000,000 people uses
> them.  How long do you think it might be until RMX or any technical
> anti-spam system could reach 80% use?

I don't consider that a valid argument against a proposal.  First, it is at 
best a baseless conclusion, no one knows what percentage of RMX or any other 
proposal would have to be in place to be 'effective' and we don't have a 
consensus algorithm to determine effectiveness anyway. Second (this is my 
bugaboo on your paragraph) what percentage of sites use filtering? Has that 
affected spam?  I don't think this element of your argument makes a difference 
as to whether RMX is a viable incremental proposal for addressing the issue of 
forgery.

> > ...
> > > However, unless you are spammer fighter interested in attacking
> > > spamemrs, you don't care who or where the spammers are if you can
> > > simply arrange to not receive their junk.
> >
> >   I agree.  But I don't think such arrangements are trivial, or easily
> > made.
> >
> >   Making more people accountable for their behaviour is just one more
> > tool in the fight against spam.  I've never claimed that any tool is
> > perfect, or that it will do everything.
>
> RMX records do nothing I can see to making people accountable for
> their behaviour ever, and certainly not until the mail of 100's of
> millions of people use them.

I do not agree with your second clause.  A single large provider or a number of 
large providers pursuing actions against 'spammers' identified via RMX (for 
example) could have a large effect.  This as you state would not affect 
behavior, but, I think you may agree accountability is a viable goal 
(incremental though it may be) towards better 'spam' controls.

> What is your agenda for flogging something that cannot have any effect
> for decades?  Or are you claiming RMX records might be used on more
> than 80% of mail within 10 years?   If so, please justify that claim.

I do not think that is the goal of RMX, in fact I don't think RMX is related to 
mail messages but to the MTA that originate and relay messages.  So a more 
exact statement would be 80% of MTAs, I don't know what the threshold for 
effectiveness is, but any effect above 0% is something to consider enhancing 
(whatever the proposal) or determining whether it can scale to large deployment 
at all.  RMX I think CAN scale.  That is not an endorsement of the particular 
approach per se, but it seems to be a salient metric.

> What does any of that have to do with stopping spam?  What does knowing
> that one of UUNet's resellers has validate a mail sender as
> wpamae1954nx@domain.com tell you?

If a reseller has validated an MTA in such a system [RMX] then you can attempt 
to make the reseller accountable for 'spam' origination.  It does not stop 
'spam'.  I think RMX would only validate the domain/IP address set not an eMail 
address per se.

> Do you check the whois records for the domains advertised in spam?
> What do you learn from records like
> http://opensrs.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?action=lookup&domain=gamingclub.com
> What would RMX tell you that whois records and IP addresses don't?

I think the whois is another spam fighting/accountability tool.  What RMX 
proposals seem to do is attempt to enhance discovery of forgery for an MTA and 
push it toward the edge of the policy boundary, although lax policy boundaries 
(an Internet mainstay) can easily short-circuit this effect.

-e
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