Re: [imap5] Feature set? - was Re: Designing a new replacement protocol for IMAP

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012, at 11:24 AM, Brandon Long wrote:
> You seem to believe that all servers can always be entirely free from
> sending spam.  That's pretty funny.

Yeah, this.  We're a lot smaller than you, and we are more strict about
spam scanning what goes OUT than what comes in, but we still wind up
with all the usual reasons why we have outbound spam :(

> [...] They don't see how much effort we put into it, and
> they know nothing about it until their account gets hijacked or one of
> their friends does and they get a mugged in London message.  Or when
> some filter gets too aggressive and they don't get a message.  Or when
> some company still thinks the spam world is black & white and uses a
> blacklist against their server.

Or because someone's incoming rate limits are delaying their messages
(just saying ;) - one of my major causes of notifications is someone
who forwards all their email to gmail causing a massive outbound
backlog when their monitoring service goes crazy and your inbound limits
are stricter than our inbound limits...

> Any effort they would have to make to
> whitelist senders before they can send them mail is something they
> aren't likely to understand the need for.

There's some nice stuff you can do with semi-automatic whitelisting
(up-rate things which are a response to something they have already
sent, certainly up-rate addresses in their address book) - but we
found you can't go too far there (like whitelisting "from self"
because the spammers will exploit that.  Same with whitelisting stuff
from someone who has already spoken to them, because it just means
you get targetted spam supposedly from someone else on a public
mailing list.

> As for getting the Facebooks of the world to open up their social
> connection information to solve the spam problem for you, well, good
> luck with that.  If you're Yahoo or Microsoft you can pay enough money
> to get access to that, and maybe its in the ToS to use it that way.

The more I read (particularly from Bruce Schneier) about this, the
more I realise that spam isn't solveable.  Make it harder, and it
will be more valuable to be able to get through, because the scammer
is no longer competing against a ton of other scams.  The flavour
might change to more targetted, but unsolicited rubbish will always
exist.  The internet is not a special flower here.

Bron.
-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  [e-mail]