in reply to Re^2: email address hiding
in thread email address hiding

What else they can they do? They can't devote 70% of their cpu time to processing spam. They also can't just summarily dump emails into /dev/null. I see the "verify" system just the beginning of a "pay me if you want to send me spam" setup. Where spammers will start offering coupons and discounts if you accept their spam. I've even been hearing talk of "email stamps" where each email has to have a email stamp, and you would get a free quota per month. No stamp, no deliver.

Hopefully, one day, agreeing to receive spam will pay my monthly connection costs. :-) I can dream can't I?

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

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Re^4: email address hiding
by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Mar 06, 2006 at 05:43 UTC

    Don't take this as preachy. It is in no way intended to be.

    Unfortunately this method shifts costs to uninvolved third parties. What happens in the case where everyone uses this method of "spam control"?

    Let's assume that the typical user gets N spam messages / day. If each one of these messages has an innocent user's address as the "from" address, then N users will get a confirmation message from me.

    Now, if we assume that the spammer is using the same list to fill the "from" and "to" addresses, then the same user should also get 10 confirmation messages.

    The network load has now "doubled". If I need to see every confirmation message to ensure that I am not "missing" a message, I still have to check out N confirmation messages.

    Let's change the distribution of from and to addresses to putting only user@example.com in the from address. Now all of the confirmation addresses are headed for that user's mailbox. Ouch.

    There are some things that can make this better, but it requires things like verifying that the host sending you mail from a user is authorized to be done by every mail host on the net. Not very likely.

    Since this is not SPAM-L or the like, this is probably not the place to get into a discussion of it, but I would recommend that if interested in this topic, to browse the SPAM-L archives or subscribe for a while. There are some very opinionated people on that list, but also some very respected people that know email, spam, filtering, blocking, and enforcement inside and out.

    In summary, anything that is cost-shifting in nature is not good when applied to the entire net. If it is used for good or bad, it is still cost shifting.

    Hopefully, one day, agreeing to receive spam will pay my monthly connection costs. :-) I can dream can't I?

    *laugh* Yes, that would be nice. At $0.02 per message, that would be about 1000 messages / month (or 30 / day). I might be able to live with that. Much more than that, and it would become painful :).

    --MidLifeXis

[reply]
      Well I basically agree with you. I liked it better when they just used SpamAssasin to filter the mail. I did switch my mail from them to an account which does use SpamAssasin.

      I don't know exactly what methods they use to determine the originating point of the email. Quite possibly they use some routing information, or the "reply-to" and not the "From" field. They must have some scheme to determine if the reply-to address exists, or if it corresponds with the routing.

      They may have developed a system to address the issues which you raise. I'm sure if they are trying to avoid their spam problem, by increasing load on the backbone which they are hooked to, the managers of the backbone will let them know.

      It seems that a few strategies are evolving, and being tested in real-time, to fight the spam problem.

      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]

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