[anti-spam-wg@localhost] Solution to Spam
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 20:23:22 -0700 (PDT)
I fully understand that this mailing list is
non-technical, however, maybe some of you know people
who develop these systems and can pass it along.
I have been reading the open letter regarding spam by
Bill Gates. I used to work for MSN UK as technical
support and I addressed this issue with them in
1997/1998. At that stage MSN's email servers were open
to the world, although filters were in place, I found
that I could send spam without to many problems.
I have considered this problem extensivly for the last
5 or 6 years and have developed a solution. This
solution is highly cost-effective and eliminates
challange-response systems.
The solution is simple:
1. Limit the number of recipients for each email. For
domestic use, 10 or 20 is quite adaquate. Emails with
more recipients than the allowed limit should
automatically be spanned as separate emails.
2. A 10-15 second delay between emails should be
imposed.
3. Each email request should force a graphic to be
loaded to the email client with an obscured word on it.
This graphic should be random.
4. Each uploaded email should have a random ID
appended to its header as an authorisation code.
5. The recipient's email server should then confirm
the code with the sending server. If the code does not
exist then the email is destroyed without notification.
So, let us do our sums on this, for an average spammer.
We'll assume that the email has 1000 recipients.
We'll perform the calculations for a limit sizes of 10
recipients per email.
1000 recipients at a limit of 10 per email would result
in 100 emails.
100 * 10 seconds delay = 1000 seconds or about 16
minutes.
add 100 * 5 second delay for loading of each
authorisation graphic = 500 seconds or about 8 minutes.
That's a total of 24 minutes to send 1000 recipients.
In the open letter, it states that several spammers
were being prosecuted for sending more than 2 Billion
emails. If this system was in operation, and even only
1 Billion emails were sent, that would have taken about
400,000 hours or 16,666 days (around 45 years or so).
This coupled with the authorisation code will
practically result in the complete elimination of spam
on the internet if universally adopted. Please feel
free to play with the figures until an adaquate balance
is achieved. The adaptations required to implement
this are of a minor nature compared with other
programming tasks and can be released as updates to
existing servers and client software.
Mark McCarron
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