Klarinet Archive - Posting 000091.txt from 2006/02

From: Tim Roberts <timr@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: Choke point?
Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2006 18:46:29 -0500

On Mon, 6 Feb 2006 11:47:59 -0800, o4rmondtoby@-----.net (Ormondtoby
Montoya)

>Is the Internet a similar situation, wherein _my_ ISP can stop my
>incoming deliveries, but there is no 'choke point' which can reasonably
>prevent someone else from entering an email into the system so long as
>they are willing/able to find/create a mailbox (that is, make a
>telephone connection) on their own initiative?
>

For all practical purposes, ALL Internet e-mail traffic in the world
today is transmitted using a protocol called "SMTP" -- Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol. There are a half-dozen popular software packages
that exchange SMTP, but they all speak the same language.

One of the issues with SMTP is that there is no way to prove that the
person sending you the e-mail is, in fact, who he professes to be.
Further, the message itself does not even need to CONTAIN the name of a
sender. It is optional. That essentially summarizes "hole" that
permits spam to continue unabated. The early residents of the Internet
prided themselves on the anonymity of the network. That cannot continue.

It would be quite possible for an enterprising group of people to
create, for example, "AMTP" -- Authorized Mail Transfer Protocol, with
some ability to embed a verifiable, traceable signature into the mail,
such that the mail programs would simply not accept unsigned messages.
That would allow my mail program, or my server, to block or allow
certain addresses based on that signature. Further, it would allow the
authorities to chase down frauds and spams.

You could even launch such a service in parallel with SMTP. Servers are
easy to launch. It would start slowly, of course, but assuming that its
users discovered that AMTP was spam-free while SMTP was not, you quickly
find that most legitimate users switched to AMTP, while SMTP was reduced
to nothing but spammers and scammers talking to each other all day.

It could be done.

--
Tim Roberts, timr@-----.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

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