[reposted: I got word this never made it to raven]
On Friday 09 May 2003 9:24 am, Greg Stigers wrote:
> > "A system that backers claim will eliminate e-mail spam is about
> > to be deployed by a major Internet service provider,
>
> I think that the only way spam will dwindle is if the ISPs get involved.
> That said, I do not think that this is a good approach.... The
> difference being that Earthlink will shift that onus on to the sender.

One of the members of my Linux user group, Mike Rubel, has come up with an
idea he thinks will help.  Turns out when he went to suggest it to some of
the major spam-combatants, he found out someone else had made an extremely
similar idea only a couple of weeks earlier.  In a nutshell, his idea is to
create a new DNS record called an "RMX" record -- similar to an MX record in
that it describes a resource of a company, however instead of pointing to a
machine capable of receiving messages, it points to the machine(s) the
company warrants are legitimately allowed to send outbound mail.

The technique you would use when validating or filtering mail is to perform
a lookup on the RMX record, and if the e-mail didn't originate from there,
consider it to be suspect [forged header]

Full details of his idea are at

     http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rmx_records/

[he tells me this has erupted into a MAJOR flamewar on some of the spam
discussion lists...]

--
Yet another blog: http://osnut.homelinux.net

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