Replacing SMTP? 539
dousette asks: "In reading over one of the RFC's governing the SMTP protocol, and other RFC's as well, it's interesting to note that you see some big names and big companies from time to time. With all the loopholes in the current SMTP specification, is it possible for the Slashdot collective to come up with another one? Would it stand a chance in making it into a standard, or do they just listen to Cisco, AT&T, etc? I realize that a lot of people have a lot of ideas how things should be done (and they haven't been shy about posting them to Slashdot), but has anyone tried to write the RFC for a replacement protocol? As a side note (where I won't be shy about posting how things should be done), if there were a replacement trusted protocol, one could have mail received via that protocol bypass spam filtering, id checking, or whatever checks might be in place (saving processor cycles, etc). The regular checks could still be done on other mail received via the 'older' SMTP protocol. If more and more ISP's make use of this, SMTP could be gradually phased out... or if you are one for a sudden cut-over, just cut to the new one at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade!"
Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:5, Informative)
http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html [cr.yp.to]
The basic premise is this:
"IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility."
It's an interesting concept and worth a read.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like it would do much to stop spamming, which is the major problem with the current internet mail infrastructure. For that, we need some way to make sending bulk email costly to spammers. Actually I'd say that this could be done already with current technologies, it's just that ISPs and large network providers are not being responsible in ensuring that the users of their networks pay the appropriate price for sending out SPAM.
Maybe ISP's should charge users for each outbound SMTP connection they make? I'd happily pay 10 cents per email I sent if it would reduce the amount of SPAM I received. It would only cost me a couple of bucks a month too at the rate that I send email
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish people would stop inviting rate increases or new charges as an answer to spam. It's not the answer. It might be inexpensive for you, but many of us DO send a lot of email and it'd get expensive really quick. You'd get rid of a lot of good and valid email communication along with the spam.
I'm even opposed to the "pay a dime, but I'll give it back if I wanted to hear from you" approach. Those of us running a mailing list would run the risk of having some idiot sign-up a bunch of accounts only to have that person say "No, I didn't want that" and collect the money.
I believe we need a trusted protocol. This might be as simple as having all emails PGP signed and everything else being sent to the bit-bucket (if you want to be aggressive) or only passed through to the user if the unsigned message had an extremely low spam score.
But if everyone were to use Bayesian I swear we wouldn't even have to propose a new protocol, talk about new legislation, etc.
*SIGH*
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)
You've never wanted to e-mail somebody who doesn't know you personally?
not the answer - you got that right! (Score:5, Interesting)
And the perfect example is regular junk snail mail. It costs them to send it, yet even in the Internet Age(tm), I still get a ton of it. Obviously that's NOT the answer, so "Don't Go There"(tm).
I think locking down SMTP servers and requiring verified & correct return addresses would go a long way toward curbing spam. Then when you disallow someone to send you mail, it could really work.
A combination of white lists/black lists, and Baysian filtering stops so close to 100% of spam that it's really silly for anyone to be bitching about spam these days. I don't GET any spam anymore - 0. Not 0.001%, 0 - the integer 0, as in none. If I ever get another piece of spam, then I'll change my email address (I can do that more easily than most as I have my own domain.), though this isn't the answer for everyone - lots of people have e-mail addresses printed up on lots of expensive cards & letterhead, etc. For them, the white list / black list / Baysian filtering solution should suffice way more than anyone should practically need.
Stop yer bitchin', people, and implement the technologies that are already out there and work great. Plus use yer freakin' brains for a change, and don't spew out your real e-mail address to everybody who asks for it. Use your friend's!
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:3, Interesting)
In that case, who would define "correct" addresses, the ISP? And how would they be defined? I have at least 1-2 email accounts that I retrieve mail from with POP3, but send outgoing mail with the same domain through my ISPs mail server because there is currently no other way. I own (or, more correctly, lease
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:5, Insightful)
---
Aye, there's the rub. I do the same thing, what with having about 5 domains and various e-mail addresses for each.
There needs to be:
1) A way of verifying if you're allowed to use said mail server. Easy. Simple login/password over encrypted connection - technology already in place.
2) A way of verifying what e-mail addresses & domains are allowed on outgoing e-mails from said mail sever. That would be new, but should be easy to develop.
3) A way of destination server contacting the originating server and verifying the e-mail it received is from an authorized and stated e-mail account. That would be new, too, and would be a bit more complicated, but still fairly simple.
4) While you're at it, you might as well encrypt the whole frigging process. The saying, "E-mail is not like a letter; it's like a postcard." should be obsolete. It should be like a letter written in a language only the sender and receiver can understand. By default. Every time. The technology is around, but needs to be standardized and integrated and something the user never has to set up or think about. I loved a recent commercial that said that something was really private, "as secret as your e-mail password." Yikes. People _really_ don't understand e-mail technology.
Also, a way to have a mail server respond to a confirmation request only by servers it's sent mail to recently would be a good thing - that would cut down on trying to scan a server with a dictionary attack to get valid e-mail addresses to spam to.
The problem is not that these are difficult technical challenges - they're not, and the technologies exist in fairly decent form already. The problem is getting this done in a standard and accepted way and out into the field for everyone to use. _That's_ gonna be a real bitch.
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:4, Informative)
2) A way of verifying what e-mail addresses & domains are allowed on outgoing e-mails from said mail sever. That would be new, but should be easy to develop.
There is a proposal for this [ietf.org], which was covered here [slashdot.org] a while back. I like the idea, although it's going to mean more ISPs will have to offer authenticated SMTP relays for roaming users (not exactly a bad thing, in any case).
Also, to those people saying Bayesian filtering is so great, this doesn't solve my problems. To filter a message on content means I have to accept the damned thing first, and I don't know about anyone else but my inbound traffic costs me money. If I accepted every piece of mail destined for my server, the costs would have me off the net in no time - I have a pretty low-budget operation. Blacklisting servers and not accepting connections from them (and accepting the collateral damage) is the only practical option I have.
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, but for most of us the *time* involved in dealing with spam is a greater cost than the bandwidth involved in receiving it. Bayesian does a great job at solving the "waste of time" problem. And, as I said, if everyone used it I believe spam would disappear quite quickly because the response rate would fall too low for even spammers to have an interest.
Blacklisting servers and not accepting connections from them (and accepting the collateral damage) is the only practical option I have.
In the case of a few a spamhauses, sure. But as an effective spam-fighting measure that's a useless approach. You (or someone) has to keep up to date with the latest servers to blacklist (and then whitelist them when they become clean), or you have to deal with an annoying level of false positives that you don't even see. Sure, you can say that that's the price of users dealing with an ISP that is spam-tolerant. But some of us want to do business with those users even if they chose their ISP poorly--or if they don't have any local choice of ISP.
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:5, Interesting)
This has already been developed by the IETF anti-spam working group, well, kind of. They propose that an additional DNS record type (RMX IIRC) is added to your domain that lists all the trusted IPs that may originate email for that domain. That would include your own outbound mailserver IPs, and/or your ISPs depending on the situation, email that doesn't come from one of the listed IPs is highly likely to be spam.
The good points:
- DNS *should* already support arbitrary record types and needs no modifications, according to the RFCs anyway, your vendor's code may not!
- It's simple to implement in SMTP software, and the IETF was hopeful they would have this up and running RSN.
The bad points:Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:3, Informative)
If the fear is people faking mail, you simply need to require it went through the mail smtp server for that domain. Then the smtp server needs to authenticate all the clients. This would mean that the client IP is irrelavent, it just had to authenticate to a listed address/server.
You still have a problem with open/insecure releys, but that will always be a problem, an insecure system will always be crackable, and people who intentionally set stuff up to allow
Re:wwwwWWWWWHHHHOOOOOOSHE! (Score:3)
SMTP is a rewrite of FTP. The original MTP was actually just a feature of FTP. You moved email in those days as if it was a file.
FTP is itself actually written as a feature set for telnet. You would log into the remote machine and then tell it to move files about.
FTP has been rewritten, it is called HTTP. The only reason HTTP exists is that FTP is horribly inefficient if you only want to move one f
Clear as mud. (Score:4, Insightful)
A combination of white lists/black lists, and Baysian filtering...
Stop yer bitchin', people, and implement the technologies that are already out there and work great.
This doesn't sound like a general solution for J. Random Homeowner.
It sounds alot like "Well, shoot! Quit yer bitchin' an just put in some tuned ports and performance cam! Hell, my grandmother could do that!"
What's the power curve on that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you done the power-curve analysis on that? My mother works at a law firm, and they once tried to install a spam filter. It was state-of-the-art, with Bayesian filtering, and white/black lists, and additional whitefilters on top. It blocked most (not all) of
Re:What's the power curve on that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Email is not a guaranteed service - no one is ever going to be sued for millions for not receiving an email. Things that *must* be delivered will continue to be put into a hard copy format and delivered by courier with a signature required.
Re:What's the power curve on that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Email can fail to arrive, or be read, for any number of reasons. It passes through several servers, each of which could fail and lose mail. Same for snail mail -- you require assurance/proof snail mail was delivered, you use registered mail, and get a receipt. There are few if any circumstances you could claim in court someone was liable for not receiving an email that you had sent and not verified had been received.
If something is in the "millions" category, you fly there and do it in person.
Put your money where your mouth is! (Score:3, Insightful)
[...]
Stop yer bitchin', people, and implement the technologies that are already out there and work great. Plus use yer freakin' brains for a change, and don't spew out your real e-mail address to
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, so imagine (in a perfect world) that everybody has 100% locked down SMTP servers, and there is an addition to SMTP that requires verified and correct return addresses on every email (regardless of the problems that such verification would cause.)
What's to stop a spammer from running his/her own mailserver (you know, like they do today), and providing 100% verified and correc
Lessening Spam: The True Hollywood Story (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is the thing - they really _shouldn't_ have to. Bad UI really ticks me off.
> I agree, however, that people are generally naive/dumb when it comes to common sense issues like sending out email addresses at will or even worse...
The thing is - I intended that for this particular audience. _SLASHDOT_ users, of all people, should know by now how to avoid getting spam. I mean _really_.
> clicking on the "Remove" links from spam! VERY DUMB!
Actually, I've proven to myself this is a myth.
Here's my story:
Last year, around, say, September or October, I was getting, on average, about 200-250 pieces of spam PER DAY. This, I realized, just Would Not Do(tm).
So, since it was obvious I was going to have to shut down all my existing e-mail addresses, generate new ones, and be ultra-selective about giving them out in the future, I realized it was time to test that "Don't click on the remove me links" piece of advice. I'd given it out myself many times, even in an article I once wrote. Time to put it to the test! So, for the period of one month, I followed all the instructions on each piece of spam, every day, to see what would happen to my flow of spam. I kept track of who was sending me spam (the company/product/service, not the 'return address'). I found out that you WILL get LESS spam if you actually follow the advice in the spam, in general. My spam reception went from the 200-250 per day to around 20 per day, in the span of about a month. Obviously, this was still way too much frigging spam, but let me say this: the spam I kept getting was almost entirely from the sources that didn't have a (working) removal method, not from the ones that did. Many of the ones that did have an (apparently) working method DO indeed take a few weeks to start working. But, surprise of surprises, it CAN indeed lessen your spam, when it's offered and is working. Bizarre, I know, but I swear it's true.
I'd still rather make spam technically impossible than rely on that, though.
I propose TMTP - the Trusted Mail Transfer Protocol.
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:not the answer - you got that right! (Score:3, Interesting)
well, no. if the scanning it set up correctly on your server then you can receive the email and scan it before giving the okay. if you don't want the email then the server simply gives a reject message and refuses to accept responsibility. ie, the scanning is underway while the sending server is waiting for it's ACK that the email has been recieved correctly. if you reject it at this stage then the sending server is still responsible and i
Be wary of 'trusted' protocols (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the answer either. Microsoft, Yahoo, et al have been lobbying for this approach, and for good reason. They want to function as the certificate authority (CA). They want to determine who can or cannot send email. They can use that power to literally sell the ability to send spam. They can also use that ability to censor their opponents.
Microsoft also wants a new patented standard that can't be legally implement with open source software.
Re:Be wary of 'trusted' protocols (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, they're applying a common practice used elsewhere (i.e. the use of PKI and trust metrics to control authentication and non-repudiation) to email. It's not like they've invented the special Microsoft Email System which is radically different from everything that's happened before.
Second of all, PGP and its web of trust are designed explicitly to avoid CA issues like you're describing. If the system is based on X509V3 certs and your web MUA controls your trusted roots, then yeah, they'd be in charge of what you'd be able to see (but presumably you'd have the ability to at least specify that you trust particular certificates).
Third of all, even if they then "sell the ability to send spam," it'd be pretty easy to tell that they've done it, tell who sent the spam, and take your business elsewhere! The whole point of authenticated, non-repudiatable email is that you actually CAN determine WHO sent the email in the first place, so that you can then track said person down and tell them (politely of course) not to do that anymore. Spam becomes much less of an issue if everybody has to legitimately say who sent every email.
So stop trying to bring about some type of scare tactic about what is probably the only real way to combat spam anyway.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't risk job loss (since I'm self-employed), but I do risk missed contracts. I use Bayesian. I've had an occasional false positive, mostly during the first couple months when I was building my corpus.
BUT: I'm currently receiving about 140 spams per day. Do you really think I'm going to do any better than Bayesian regarding false positives when I'm mass-deleting 140 messages? I think not. I'm almost positive I'm going to incorrectly delete more good messages than Bayesian's false positive rate when I'm dealing with such a huge number of emails manually.
Plus if your Bayesian system is half-decent you should be able to adjust its sensitivity. On mine 0-49% is almost always good email and 50%-99% is almost always spam. When I look for false positives I look for anything unusually low, such as 65% or so. If you want, just adjust your threshold to 65%. I've never had a valid email with a Bayesian score of, say, 90%.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:2, Insightful)
you don't realize that IM is a form of email? you are just sending packets of text... the second someone charges for SMTP, i'll just run my own. you could just charge the end users for data transfered instead of flat monthly fee, but most wouldn't go for that.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:3)
-a
Recipient-based Pay-By-Email (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:5, Insightful)
With the current system, an smtp server can go down, and no one would notice because no one was received their email yet, but with im2000, if the sending machine goes down, then no one can read their mail from there. This would create a lot of unknowns, "why can't I read my email?". Also what about people that don't have a full on connection, you don't want to require those people to be connected just to read their mail. Sure you can queue it for downloading offline somehow, but that's going to be much slower than normal because you have to connect to say 30 different servers where your email is hosted.
Also there's the case of somesmallcompany.com sending out a mailer/advertisement to millions of people, because the email is hosted on their machine, their connection/server might become overwhelmed, causing heaches for everyone wanting to read their mail. "Why does my mail load so slow?"
It's a nice try, but it'll never work.
Another thing, what happens when the message is done being read? Is it deleted on the sender's machine? If so, then how will the user remember that they sent the email to check if it's been read. If not, when will the message get deleted? Obviously it can't stay there forever.
The great thing about the current system, is that you just send and forget. If it bounces, you get a new email message saying hey, something went wrong. But with im2000, if the message hasn't been read yet, WHY? Did the user just not check their mail yet? Is there connection/routing problem where they suddenly occurred after the hosting server sent the notification, etc.
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:2)
Do you suppose the ISP that is owned by SpamCo, Inc. would actually charge its users the fee?
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the cost becomes built in to their business model. it won't stop, it will only hurt regular users to charge for email/services. Sure, their profits may be cut a little bit, but that's not going to stop them. if anything, they'll do it more, because if their profit margin is smaller, they'll have to spam harder... right?
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)
But making spam costly will indeed stop the majority of spam that is sent today, which is useless, annoying stuff that far less than 1/100 of 1 percent of people actually make a purchase based on.
That is the kind of spam that I really want to stop, and I think that making spamming
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:5, Informative)
John Dvorak suggested a scheme along these lines, and in theory, it's a good one, though I'd suggest a tenth of a cent, which would still make sending a million emails prohibitively expensive.
In practice, though, it's not workable. Spammers aren't using the SMTP server their ISP provides; they're using their own, just like most desktop Linux users are. As far as the ISP is concerned, Spammer X is making a bunch of outbound connections, but they're streaming out through the ISP's switches and routers, not through their SMTP server.
To impose a tax on certain kinds of TCP connections would require detailed inspection of outbound packets. This is because a single SMTP connection can involve the transfer of many messages. To be reliable, the ISP would have to parse every outbound packet bound for port 25 on a remote system in order to count the number of emails sent. I don't think most people want that level of attention paid to their private emails.
Moreover, this presumes that all ISPs participate honestly and thoroughly in such a system. All it would take is a few spam-friendly ISPs (and they exist, are legion, and jump around IP ranges like ferrets on a hot skillet) to render such a system useless.
The alternative would be to implement email billing at the recipient side. Maybe AOL and Earthlink can pull that kind of blockade off, but small companies and J. Random Luser cannot.
Bernstein's IM2000 proposal at least keeps the bandwidth consumption down, but that's primarily a cost issue for ISPs. (Don't try to convince me that if the amount of spam declined, ISPs would lower their prices.) The main hassle of spam for the user is that it takes time and energy to delete spam, and having to inspect the stuff with ambiguous could-be-from-someone-I-know subject lines would not be alleviated by IM2000; you'd still have to pick and choose what pending inbound email to read or delete.
The fundamental problem with email as a mail system is that it's open to anyone who wants to send mail -- which is part of the point of mail in the first place -- but there is no economic limiting factor for the sender as there is with paper mail. Since we can't eliminate the openness without destroying the utility of the system, the only possible strategy is to artificially impose a cost on the sender. Unfortunately, owing to the nature of public networking, the only remotely reliable way to do that would be to route all mail through a centralized clearing house. No one company will be able to establish such a monopoly, and I don't think anyone wants the alternative -- which is to have the government do it.
This may or may not be a soluble problem, but it is, as of today, still an unsolved problem. Personally, I think it's going to take national legislation and international agreements to stop it, and that will no doubt take a long time. Paper (actually clay tablet) mail existed for several millennia before the International Postal Union was finally established. Let's hope email is brought into line a little faster than that.
sender stored message makes sender accessible (Score:3)
That's important. A reachable IP makes identification easier. Besides, the sender is also responsible for storage and bandwidth, and those are costs I can bear for my personal correspondents, but that would move spam a little further from free.
The question is a better one than I thought when I first read it. Although it doesn't sound like IM2000 can guarantee a low enough level of spam by itself, I would not only install a n
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, it's just an idea. I think that the whole question of "should we come up with a new mail protocol" is kind of misguided because obviously the hard problems here are not technical, they're in dealing with the huge momentum built up around the current mail technologies. It seems to me that we already have all the technology that we need to solve this problem, it's more a matter of enforcement by ISPs. I was just posting the link because it was relevent.
If you're the same Mr. Sam that made Courier, then thanks
Re:Check out Internet Mail 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, you see one of your own message IDs in the References: header of an incoming message. That tells you that it's a solicited response to one of your own messages. Unless you're a troll, presumably each one of your messages merits a
djb again (Score:2)
What about the evil bit :P (Score:2, Funny)
New Protocol Name (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New Protocol Name (Score:2, Funny)
Re:New Protocol Name (Score:3, Funny)
Jabber (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Jabber (Score:3, Informative)
They are instead backing the (IMO) inferior SIP/SIMPLE technology for IM.
Read The IM Standards Race [jabber.com] for more information.
Costs (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of research and ideas and papers have been thrown around to replace SMTP with a better protocol but the costs involved are a major discouraging factor and people don't want to install a system when there is no guarantee that all the recipients have it too.
Maybe servers using a new mail protocol should be designed such that they first attempt to use the new protocol and if connect fails, try the good old SMTP
Re:Costs (Score:3, Interesting)
The advantage to this is that you can introduce new protocols completely painlessly. You pick a new name (after asking around on the newsgroup if anyone is using it), link your new protocol modul
Re:Costs (Score:5, Informative)
Check out RF2821.
SDTP (Score:5, Funny)
SlashDot Transfer Protocol - Essentially, the way it works, is the information is posted on one single, easily crashed server. Then, this information is linked to by Slashdot. Then, said server is taken down. However, 1,000 other posters will have mirrored it by then, therby helping in the "transfer" of the information.
Re:SDTP (Score:2)
Re:SDTP (Score:2)
Of course, SDTP also utilizes GCIP (Google Copyright Infringing Protocol) often. =)
*Preemptive Note: GCIP is not meant to be taken seriously in any way. Seeing that this is Slashdot, I am sure there are people that would read more into it then was meant.
What loopholes in SMTP? (Score:2)
SPAM is a problem, but I think it can be fixed above SMTP by whitelisting or webs of trust. What are these "loopholes" in SMTP?
Re:What loopholes in SMTP? (Score:5, Interesting)
At least if some one had to authenticate to send as joe@bar.com, some spammer would have to hack your password before they used your email address as the "From:" in a mailing...which just happened to me.
SMTP AUTH (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What loopholes in SMTP? (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, lack of authentication is a strength of SMTP, just as it is with IP. It means, for example, that I can implement my own authentication (or plug in PGP or whatever), and don't have to use the mail-transfer layer's after it turns out to have a serious hole that lets the spammers and con-men through.
Protocols that try to do everything for you have the inherent problem that, when a serious problem arises, you have to put up with it until the idiots at the vendor decide to solve it.
SMTP is simple enough that even a relatively incompetent programmer can do it correctly. You can type it yourself via a telnet connection.
And adding features in the higher layers is easy.
slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a chance. The slashdot collective taken as a whole, is a very stupid group of people. Even the few intelligent people wouldn't be able to get anything useful done because they'd be shouted down by the teaming masses of idiots.
We hate Sony's recording arm, but we'll sell our souls to them for the next cool gadget. We hate MS, but 90% of us use windows on our main home machine. No to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen.
QWERTY!!! (Score:2, Flamebait)
Moral: Just because one design is better than an already widespread yet inferior design does not mean that it can and will replace the current one. Change is not easy in the least.
QWERTY speeds typing. QWERTY 4ever! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:QWERTY speeds typing. QWERTY 4ever! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:QWERTY!!! (Score:2)
Perhaps this resulted in a sub-optimal layout so that one can't type as fast on QWERTY as on other layouts, but were the engineers really thinking "Let's slow the typist down", rather than "Let's spread the keys around to minimize collisions"?
Think how many devices (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but don't be fooled into thinking it's just a "propose a new spec, step 2?, profit" type of deal....
--D
Re:Think how many devices (Score:2)
well... ok... (Score:5, Funny)
HELO imamailserver.com
250 Hello imamailserver.com [127.0.0.1] nice to meet you!
Klingon protocol (Score:3, Funny)
SPF (Score:4, Interesting)
Will receive email for work. (Score:5, Interesting)
This would make it too slow to send spam, by making it simply too processor intensive. Legitimate users would be unaffected.
Re:Will receive email for work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most examples of "takes a second or two" are very processor dependent. You'd then also have the problem of running code on another machine, DOS attacks, all that fun.
Re:Will receive email for work. (Score:3, Insightful)
It might work to allow the reciever to have a whitelist of addresses -- so that you only have to do the work if you are sending to someone you don't know. Still, I sure wouldn't want to have to let my compute
Re:Will receive email for work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Difficult Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that something ought to be done to cut down on the huge volume of spam that clogs most SMTP traffic.
On the surface of it, a white-listing system, perhaps based on public-key cryptography and endorsements might work.
But, as someone who values freedom and anonymity, I'd hate to have a system that closes off completely the opportunity for more anonymous communication via email.
Whistleblowers in the government and in the corporate sector, dissidents under a repressive political regime are some of the use cases for email that I'm not really inclined to sacrifice merely to eliminate spam.
RFC2549 a suitable alternative? (Score:2, Funny)
With all the loopholes in the current SMTP specification,is it possible for the Slashdot collective to come up with another one?
To start with, I would suggest a detailed look at RFC 2549 [isi.edu].
The Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers described therein is fairly broad and could prove a feasible alternative to current email delivery mechanisms, specifically SMTP.
The reason I think it hasn't taken off since 1999 is that it proposes to completely replace IPv4 (like IPv6). Maybe it wou
Yeah right... (Score:5, Funny)
Like IPv6? You mean most things will already be there but no one will support it, no one will care apart from a few and no one will implement regardless of how hopeless and disastrous the current implementation is?
Ah yes, like IPv6 indeed. You know, I'll send a shiny mail delivered by SMTP2* over an IPv6* internet about the release of Duke Nukem Forever* to my gaming-addicted girlfriend* on the day SCO coughs up some evidence*
Note:
* = May or may not require divine intervention.
Re:Yeah right... (Score:3, Funny)
Think about what you're saying! Do you want a girlfriend that:
never has time for you
too into the game to bathe for weeks at a time
more interested in game than sex
kicks your ass in Quake
I didn't think so
Can we build it? Yes we can! (Score:2)
Yes, I'm sure that Slashdot is up to the task of coming up with another loophole.
SMTP over TLS (Score:5, Insightful)
Working out the details of an appropriate certificate policy is not trivial, though.
... at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade! ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
C'mon now; the IPv6 upgrade will be spread out over at least several decades. And both Microsoft systems and many US Government installations will still be using it a century from now, because it's "standard".
After all, it's now past the death of typewriters, and we're still using the typewriter keyboard from nearly two centuries ago. And we use a ridiculous rail gauge, because the standard was set centuries ago.
And here in the US, we're still using inches and feet, measurements based on the lengths of the thumb and foot of a long-dead king. And we call them "standard".
We will be stuck with IPv4 for long past the final download of anyone reading this.
SMTP will probably be around even longer. But that's OK; it's fun to impress friends by a "telnet 25", followed by typing in a message directly to the server. I like to use "MAIL From: dubya@whitehouse.gov", and ask them if they'd be interested in a nice job in the TIA program. Then I challenge them to prove from the message they get who actually sent it.
Re:... at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade! ??? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't laugh. The following might be apocryphal, but it's still interesting .... I don't know where it comes from, though:
Re:... at the same time as the IPv6 upgrade! ??? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.ht
Their best comment on it is probably:
Marvelling that the width of modern roadways is similar to the width of ancient roadways is sort of like getting excited over a notion such as "modern clothes sizes are based upon standards developed by medieval tailors." Well, duh.
Then they go into a rather detailed explanation of why it's basically an uninteresting historical semi-truth for exactly this sort of reason.
Still, the modern "standard" railway gauge does go back at least a few centuries. And the early railroad equipment was derived from the sort of horse-drawn vehicles (carriages and carts), so of course it was about the same size.
But in the "standards" sense, the current American rail gauge doesn't really trace back to anything Roman, or much before around 1800. Before that, it's just vague copying, with sizes coming out nearly the same because the job (carrying people and their luggage) was about the same.
The Space Shuttle tie-in is completely bogus.
Waste of time and effort. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's simple. Don't bother.
The problem will remain, it will just shift tactics. By 'fixing' SMTP you're not addressing the problem, you're addressing a symptom of the problem.
Anything we do on the technology side to fix this problem will ultimately do nothing.
That's not to say that SMTP can't be improved on... but improving on it purely to 'stop spam' is a waste.
I have been working on another one (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I've been working on a broader based piece of infrastructure than a new mail protocol, but the first problem I intend to attack is mail.
RFC 822 is fine for messages, but the transport needs a big upgrade. Also, envelope senders and receivers are non-verifiable, and therefor broken. One day, spammers are going to start using mailing lists and message boards to construct a profile of people you talk to, and send you mail that appears to come from them, thereby making whitelists useless.
The basic premise of my general transport is that all messages are addressed to a public key and come from a public key. All messages are signed by their supposed source ID, and most messages are encrypted to the destination ID.
A public key ID plays a similar role to an IP address in an IP packet. There will be distributed databases that hold (signed) mappings between public key IDs and their locations using other networking mechanisms.
I'm trying to design this protocol and its implementation so its easy to encapsulate it in almost anything. My first connection to an outside protocol will be IMAP/SMTP.
It's far from being ready for even a public alpha yet, but I do have preliminary code for creating certain kinds of messages at https://svn.generalpresence.com:5131/repos/trunk/C ++/pract_crypto/ [generalpresence.com]. I'm borrowing heavily from Bruce Shcneier and Niels Ferguson's latest book, Practical Cryptography. The initial implementation is in a mix of Python and C++. It requires Swig and the GMP library. I haven't designed the implementation itself to be in the least robust against attacks by someone who has root on your machine.
I am calling the protocol 'CAKE' for now. CAKE stands for Key Addressed Crypto Encapsulation. It is a layered protocol, since I intend it to be layered on top of any other protocol you can think of. :-)
One intention of mine is to publish a hash collision problem along with information mapping a public key to a mailbox. First time senders will have to solve the hash collision problem to avoid having the mail thrown away. I'm planning on simply wrapping an RFC 822 message in a CAKE shell.
Well time to start with an Internet Draft (Score:2)
From there it can be evaluated, a Working Group created to push it through engineering review to Last Call, to proposed standard.
Sounds easy, well you can expect to spend aproximately 20 hrs/wk on it for 3 years, and that is if it is a non-controversial idea. For something controversial like changing the SMTP protocol, expect it to effectively never happen, why you might ask... Well lets say the first problem i
It's not going to happen (Score:2)
Just kidding.
Seriously, because of spam issues, there have been many proposals for ways to replace SMTP or to modify it. Some of them are downright comical.
But it's going to take something a lot bigger than that to change anything.
Any replacement would have to be completely backwards compatible with SMTP for years to come. Many people would never switch. Others would switch only after seeing it in operation for a long time.
Since it would have to be comp
P2P email (Score:2)
Are you sure the problem is primarily with SMTP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Non-email messaging systems have been thinking about virtually the same problem quite a bit, and have come up with a set of solutions that try to solve what are fundamentally the same issues: message integrity, message non-repudiation, and message authentication. And the surprising part of this is that nobody really focused on the protocol, because it doesn't provide the path to a meaningful solution to the problem.
Case in point: web services. While initially the people who were playing iwth web services started out doing security at the transport level (i.e. with SSL and various derivatives thereof), but realized that something like WS-Security (where the security of a message is a part of the message itself) is the more optimal approach.
Why not just force the issue into the realm of S/MIME (and similar extensions to rfc822) and handle it at MUA space? You can cover virtually all the problems with SPAM by following the example of the reliable messaging systems and doing more with the contents of the message itself, rather than trying to say that messages have to transmit over a particular protocol. For example, depending on your trust environment, S/MIME signatures solve the authentication, non-repudiation, and integrity problems perfectly. What more do you need/want?
Why replace it? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you exent it two servers with the extensions will send mail in the new more secured format.
Frst things first keep it friendly you should be able to do everything via telnet because it jsut makes testing easy.
So what do you need a little bit on how to get into this new mode once your connected to port 25.
The server must offer what encryption methods it allows as a list more perfered methods first. Unencrypted should be an option all senders and receivers MUST allow it as encryption is nice but CPU heavy and you can allays depreciate enencrypted senders.
There should be a DNS entry for the sending mail servier in the domain that the from address and the reply to address originate (some new DNS field well it's a nice big distributed DB with cache so why not?) This needs more work and it sorta outside of scope.
If the sender domain is part of the servers domain of responcibility the server must use the from and replyto addresses to authenticate the user(s) passwords via CHAP, Kerebros etc this MUST be done after the encrypted state is up and can NOT allow unencrypted passwords and perferable uses a CHAP like system where the password is never on the wire.
The receiving server must include all options specified by the sending server as message headers.
The server MUST only accept mail that is destined to it's domains or source from one of it's domains if accompinied with valid credentials.
A server to server intermediary authentication may be implemented.
OK thats no where near completed but it's a start.
SMTP is not the problem (Score:3, Informative)
SMTP already has authentication, and anyone who operates an SMTP server is free to accept or not accept mail from whomever he wants. You don't need a new protocol to require mail to be authenticated. If you can solve the trust problem, you can implement a trusted mail solution more quickly and easily with SMTP than by requiring deployment of an entirely new protocol.
Pragmatism required (Score:3, Informative)
How about this? (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't break anything as it stands now, users/admin can choose how its handled, and should be fairly simple to implement.. There would be an overhead cost of keeping track of the MD5's... But it could be done...
Just an idea... Waiting to be shot down...
Karma! (Score:3, Funny)
Simple premise - everyone in the world signs onto the 'KarmaMail' service, and get to send mail at "1". Once enough KarmaMail users validate the user's email as being legitimate, their Karma goes up. Registered users can also complain about a spammer, thus making their Karma go down. Marking email messages as 'urgent' requires a higher Karma. Users with a negative Karma (>= -5?) can only send at '0'. Users with a very negative Karma get booted off the system.
Then individual users can use Karma plus Whitelists to decide who to read mail from. Whenever a server receives mail, it checks with the central KarmaMail repository and inserts the user's Karma into the mail headers (optionally, Karma can be assigned to the *server* as well, eliminating the open relay problem). The header can then be processed by the mail reader.
Maybe someone would care to expand this idea further to clear up the many loopholes I've left?
SMTP is not the problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
In the country where I live there is a general rule for farm animals, the farmer is not responsible for fencing them in, it is your job to fence them out. Mail is the same, its not my job to stop spam being sent, but to stop it being delivered (to my users) There are many ways to do this, a combination of a few can be very effective.
As for the home user, well stop buying into the "submit your e-mail and we will send you porn" forms on the sites you wife does not want you to look at.
Not much wrong with SMTP, just use teergrubing (Score:3, Insightful)
Judicious teergrubing (intentional slowing of responses; teergrube is German for tarpit) can alleviate many problems.
For example, let's examine the Rumplestiltskin attack (a form of dictionary attack to guess e-mail addresses). The trouble here is that most mail servers send back their "No such account" response immediately, so an attacker can try about 5-15 addresses a second. If the mail server was programmed to wait 5 seconds before sending back the response, then the Rumplestiltskin attack would be slowed down by about 50 times. Even better would be to make the delay longer and longer for repeated attempts from the same IP. This way, a normal user with a couple of dud e-mail addresses is not harmed much, but the Rumplestiltskin attack eventually gets bogged down in the tarpit. We have a 3 second delay at the login prompt if we enter the wrong password, so why not a delay at the mail server for incorrect e-mail addresses?
Another way to slow the spam is to teergrube *all* e-mail connections so all email takes a few minutes to send. Legitimate users aren't harmed much by this, but spammers are hurt a lot. Spammers rely on speed to send all their e-mail, and if we slow them down we can hurt them.
Then there's the question of what happens if a spammer sends another RCPT or other similar packet before receiving the response from the first? SMTP can legally drop the connection because such command buffering may be "unsupported". So the spammer must be teergrubed or must experience a *lot* of dropped connections.
There's no need to replace SMTP yet. Instead, we use the tools we have in a slightly different way, and the spammer can be inconvenienced a lot.
For more information on teergrubing, go here [iks-jena.de].
SMTP should have been replaced long ago (Score:5, Interesting)
There once was a very interesting competing standard from OSI, the X.400 standard. Most people now think of X.400 as an interconnect standard for bridging the various email systems out there. Yet, it actually is a specification for a very robust email system in and of itself. It is based on a self-describing data representation... no, not XML since XML wasn't even a twinkle in someone's eye at that time, but ASN.1. That standard has been somewhat successful as used in X.500, which has become somewhat popular through its exposure via LDAP.
SMTP has never been a particularly strong standard. First, it is not the specification for a complete email system. It mearly describes a protocol for exchanging messages between two processes via the network. This is not sufficient to build an email system. Thus we also get POP and IMAP, and any number of supplimental bits that are not necessarily standards. Even sticking to exchanging email between two processes, SMTP has always been rather loosely specified. Sendmail has served as the reference implementation. Supporting sendmail was more a matter of figuring out what it was doing than reading the SMTP specification since sendmail used a far richer protocol for exchanging email than described in the specification. Thus, the question of what comprised a compliant implementation was more like (does it interoperate fully with sendmail) than going through a specification and checking off each element it described.
Apollo started a project to produce a native X.400 email system. It had a very rich set of features that go far beyond what we see today in Unix and Windows email systems. The project was put on hold when I was reassigned to a higher priority task, I was a member of a strategic technology team given the task of determining what "everyone" meant by the term "CASE Integration" with the goal of producing a corporate strategy and piloting and/or prototyping some initial products. Given the state of the CASE community, it sure seems like pursuing the email strategy would have had better long term success. Of course the CASE Integration project died a painful and horrible death when HP bought the company. Surely "SoftBench" did everything and more...
Re:SMTP should have been replaced long ago (Score:3, Funny)
Gee whiz! Better mod this one "+10: Self-Proclaimed Expert" to distinguish it from all the other stuff on
Currently being discussed (Score:3, Informative)
This is currently being discussed on NANOG [merit.edu] (where it's an offtopic favorite). I highly recommend this list for peeks and views into the people who keep this Internet thing working.
In the discussions yesterday and today, there's been a lot of talk about how to "bootstrap" this new protocol. There are interesting discussions of the business ramifications of being an early adopter of something like this -- very sililar to those for IPv6.
It's been said by far wiser people than me: spam is a social problem, and it must have a social cure. Any solution which does not respect these two facts is doomed to failure.
Been there, done that. (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to fire up your own X400 server to play with, grab isode and try to get it to compile on your machine without gagging if you can. Its one nasty bit of bad code.
SMTP isn't that broken. It works for about a billion people. Any attempt to "fix" it will break it for way too many of them.
After looking through the posts here (most of the +5 should be -5 Stupid), its clear that most of the experts don't understand email in the real world.
Encryption:
The 1st tings is email must be interceptable. Many governments won't allow high level encryption that isn't full of holes that allow them to play pack recorded streams. Most large email servers can't deal with the CPU load of full encryption anyway so 100% solid encryption is out.
Authentication:
Authenticating the server is very importaint to many sites. Once you start doing some level of encryption, you need to make sure you know who your connecting to.
Authenticating the client is the where spam issue comes from. There are many ways to do this but none of them are being done and none of them work 100% (which is why none of them work)
There is no way of knowing of a new business is a spamer or not. Therefore there is no way to filter out spamers that have enough cash to hook up to new ISPs all the time. (there are some stupid ideas like charging--my isp is rich enough, forcing all email out--my isp's mail server is up 100% doesn't understand MX,I can run my own server and it works so why chnage?)
reverse MX record checks only work if you can trust the ISP to get reverse dns working correctly and they won't deligate it to a spam house. The other choice is a verisgn like company to whitelist everyone or some sort of distributed whitelist (which the spamers will try to hack into)
As far as fixes:
The solution is patch sendmail, qmail, postfix, exim to understand email on port 26 (pointed to by a srv record) and if mail comes in on the new port, then it must be checked with a reverse MX record or its dropped. Get the clients to stop handing off email on port 25 (sendmail allows port 587 for that) Use something like the SSH transport layer to encrypt (i.e. set up the encrypted channel 1st and then figure out whos talking). Add a new smtp verify_message command so I can ask another server "did you send me messages Xcxczxczqweczx?". Patches for all 4 systems must come out at the same time but be tested aginst each other. The when an ISP figures enough of its mail comes in on something other than 25, kill port 25 forever. That will kill all the proxies and all the old email gateways that haven't been updated in years.
Or save up your money and buy your self an X.400 gateway license adn tell all your friends about your cool new email address with all thouse nice slashes and no @.
A simple as hell answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously ISPs will have to have the ability to store the messages of their users so they can deliver them while the user is offline, but that's no problem. If a user, or someone else, sends spam, once the ISP is notified, they can remove it from their servers, so that no further people who were sent the spam will actually recieve it upon reading their email.
Why I'm writing this I don't know. No one reads below score 3 anyway unless you're lucky and get one of the first 10 replies. Slashdot is useless. I'd shit myself if one person actually read this post. Hell, I can't even find posts after I make them, even after waiting several hours.
This is not the right group to do this (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget fees and filters. Shoot the relays! (Score:3, Interesting)
The only really effective way I can think of is another fscking registry. ISPs and companies large enough to really need external relays pay the fee to register their mail-server there, and the new implementation of the SMTP-protocol only accepts external mail from other listed servers.
The downside? A fee comparable to the price of a domain name for ISPs, companies and stubborn individuals. Don't give me the old crap about "having to run your own relay", because you still could, by in turn having it relay through your ISPs server. Your ISP doesn't provide you with a relay? After this, they would have to.
The upside? It would be a lot easier to blacklist spammers. No more hijacked boxes on broadband-connections flooding us with spam.
Oh, I know, it will be shot down because there's a fee involved, but keep in mind that I would be one of the people that would have to pay that fee, and it would be a very small price to pay to protect myself and my users from spam.
Re:Interesting idea (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:2)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:2)
HTTP supports on-the-fly compression. Your browser can specify which compression types it accepts with the Accept-Encoding [w3.org] header.
Your web server can support it by sending a Content-Encoding [w3.org] header.
For apache support, see mod_deflate [apache.org].
Re:What a silly article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a silly article. (Score:3, Insightful)