Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Alan MacHett" <machett AT ibiblio.org>]

So! ... if the only way to defeat spam is via technological means, then
what is that means?

At the root of the issue, would it be best that the spam:
(a)is not able to be sent in the first place,
(b)never arrives on the mail servers,
(c)never arrives at anyone's INBOX,
(d)retaliation (e.g. robot trojan horses that return to spammers), or
(e)some combination of the above
...???

And that choice being made, then what is the best system of achieving that
end?  Plenty of attempts have already been made and implemented; I've
listed several below.  However, lets start from scratch.  What would your
fantasy system do?  How do you imagine that spam should or can be halted?

I'm confident that there *is* an answer to this problem.  It might be a
very complex answer (or hell! maybe it's so obvious none of us has seen it
yet) but it essentially boils down to a science.  Be it system programming
or mathematical analysis or linguistic analysis or whatever, it can be
defined and defeated by some science or sciences.

___________________________________
__________Mail Protocols:__________

[rant]STARTTLS extension to SMTP as described in RFC2487:
http://whatexit.org/tal/mywritings/endofspam.html

"Senders Permitted From" RFC / Designated Mailers Protocol:
http://spf.pobox.com/

A teergrubing mailserver costs a spammer multiple SMTP connections:
http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/usenet/teergrube.en.html

___________________________________
_________Analysis Programs:________

http://au2.spamassassin.org/
http://www.procmail.org/
http://www.cloudmark.com/products/
http://www.brightmail.com/

___________________________________
__Challenge-Response/Opt-In Email:_

ChoiceMail One 2.0, opt-in email:
http://www.digiportal.com/choicemail.html

SpamArrest Challenge-Response email:
http://spamarrest.com/
___________________________________

--Alan