Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 17 Jun 2004 Walled Gardens Email I was listening to Vint Cerf talk at the ETC conference this morning on the history of the Internet and the future of e-mail. One of the more problematic approaches to spam is a walled garden, an e-mail systems that lets its users exchange mail, but doesn't let mail to or from the rest of the world in or out. Walled gardens are easy to keep spam-free, since the management can set rules and eject people who misbehave. Why didn't the Internet didn't have any spam for the first decade of its existence? Because it was a walled garden. You could only get in if you were an ARPA or later NSF contractor, there were clear rules, and people could be and were ejected for abuse. Has there ever been a system that allowed cheap communication, didn't have an abuse problem, and wasn't a walled garden? I don't think so. As soon as fax machines became cheap, we had a junk fax problem. As soon as robocallers became cheap, we had a robot junk call problem. The phone system by its nature is considerably more secure than the Internet, and it's very hard to make a phone call that can't be traced. (You may have to subpoena the info from the phone companies, but that's a detail.) This suggests that the authentication schemes that people are working on, sich as SenderID (SPF+Caller ID merged) and Domain Keys will be useful if they can provide a level of authentication comparable to what the phone system has. It also suggests that we still need better anti-spam laws, since the junk faxes and robocalls are only kept in check by rather draconian laws that outlaw them completely. For spam, we can only hope. posted at: 13:44 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/walled.trackback 13 Jun 2004 E-mail address forgery Email In my roles as postmaster at CAUCE (the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) and abuse.net, I get a lot of baffled and outraged mail from people who have discovered that someone is sending out spam, often pornographic spam, with their return address on the From: line. ``How can they do that? How do I make them stop?'' The short answers are ``easily'' and ``it's nearly impossible.'' One way that e-mail is very similar to paper mail is that you can scribble any return address you want on an envelope and mail it. With paper mail, just like e-mail, you can imagine ways to make it more difficult to scribble the name of someone you don't like, but the costs of doing so would be huge, and the benefits dubious. ... ... read the mini-paper on-line ... mini-paper printable version posted at: 01:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/forge.trackback 11 Jun 2004 Conferences (Updated) Email Spam still is a hot topic, there's a lot of conferences. E-mail Tech Conference, sponsored by Ironport and others. In San Francisco, June 16-18, 2004. Practical orientation, invited speakers, exhibits. WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam sponsored by the International Telecommunications Union. In Geneva, July 7-9, 2004. The ITU is the United Nations agency that coordinates all of the world's national communications regulators for radio, TV, telephony, and the like. This meeting is part of the World Summit on the Information Society, I'll be there, not sure if I'll be presenting or not. Geneva speaks French, but the meeting is in English. First Conference on Email and Anti-Spam sponsored by Microsoft Research and a host of four-letter organizations. In Mountain View CA, July 30-31, 2004. Research orientation with refereed papers. I'm on the program committee, and some of the papers I've reviewed have looked pretty interesting. 60th IETF sponsored by the Internet Engineering Task Force. In San Diego, Aug 1-6, 2004. The IETF is the group of nerds that manages the technology of the Internet through "rough consensus and running code." Spam is only one of topic of many, but more likely than not I'll be giving a sweeping technical overview of the spam situation. posted at: 03:22 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/conferences0407.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 8 Email - 116 ICANN - 52 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs Spam resource (Al Iverson) The Spam Diaries (Ed Falk) Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) Lextext (Bret Fausett) Related sites IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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