On Mon, 6 Feb 2006, Tim Hall wrote:
TH>What's the whole Sender: thing, and what would have happened had it not
TH>been neglected?
Spam was successful because the From: line is easy to spoof. Period, full
stop.
Initially, that was a feature, not a bug. You were supposed to be able to
send mail from, say, a friend's house, and have it still say "From:
Me@my.house" But to indicate where it really came from, you were supposed
to say "Sender: Friend@friends.house" *That* was the address that was
always, always supposed to be legit. But nobody bothered checking it, in
two senses: neither friends.house nor the recipient ever checked to make
sure the outbound mail had a proper sender attached, and the recipient's
mail software never bothered to indicate "Hey, this says it's from Tim,
but he sent it from a friend's house."
Now, even if Sender was enforced it would be quite possible to forge From:
lines... but because the whole thing was so horribly, horribly lax it gave
spammers a huge head start before anybody really realized just what a
scale it was happening on.
TH>I've always wondered whether the proliferation of spam is partly because
TH>there are a lot of companies making money out of spam filtering, who
TH>would all go out of business if anyone devised a magic bullet to prevent
TH>spam.
Oh, definitely. Not just spam filtering, but pink contracts... providing
connectivity to spammers is *very* lucrative.
There's gotta be some serious bribery involved in the FTC/FDA, too... most
spam is fraudulent, and plenty of vigilantes have tracked spam back to its
source and had the agencies go "Yeah, so?"
--
Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
