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2007 and we still have SPAM... December 14th 2006, ricardo
SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAAM SPAAAAAAAMM... oups! hehe... too much monty phyton latelly...

I wonder how is it possible that being in 2007 (almost) we (the humanity) didn't find yet a solution for the Spam. It's funny how the internet evolves, how many new technologies appear everyday, how much work the people does on the web side, and how little work the people does for real troubles like the spam. Wouldn't if be funny if whenever you fill a form to register for a bank account in the real world there is a box that says "Anti-Spam: What is the sum of 0 and 3?".

And I'm not really talking about receiving it cos there are some ways for detecting it. The real problem is when somebody decides to use your domain as the sender, something like random_name@yourdomain.com. That will made you receive a lot of MAILER-DAEMON emails saying that your email wasn't delivered, and the worst part is that your domain can end up in blacklist of spammers.

That is really pathetic.

A) The ability of sending an email being able to put any sender that you want, lets say bill@microsoft.com without having to authenticate or something. Is it me, or after a lot of years with internet we should have found a way to handle this?

B) I don't know how blacklist for spammers work, but if they can add a domain in a blacklist, that could be quite unprofessional cos they would be the first ones to know that the owner of the domain didn't have to do anything with the spam that was sent. Instead of adding domains to a database they could spend his time finding a way to improve the system properly.

Solutions?

A) Changing the way of how mail works, maybe having to pay for sending an email. I guess the main problem are the mail servers, would it be possible to change how they work so they only allow emails from certified email addresses?

B) No idea.. by now I will get rid of the catch-all account and will allow only 3 or 4 email addresses. So my server will give a mailer-daemon of a mailer daemon. Silly.

Does anyone know about all this??
5 comments

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December 14th 2006, sml
I'm afraid, your comment was flagged up as SPAM. However, the comment is going to be reviewed and in the case is not SPAM will be manually approved

LOL
December 14th 2006, sml
Viagra para todo dios!!!!
December 14th 2006, VIAGRA
could be nice that email clients refuse emails not validating a reverse dns lookup against the same Ip's where the domain was brought. i.e ricardocabello.com solves to 207.7.108.243
so when recieving an email from mrdoob @ ricardocabello.com , was actually coming from burnaby.textdrive.com ?¿?¿? that's the reseller of your domain?...jmmm problems, this is a difficult matter
December 19th 2006, JaK
That's the name of the server.

Checking the reverse dns doesn't have much sense since the usual shared hosting solution is too common nowadays. And obviously the mail server may be in a different machine than the web server, although they are mapped to that top level domain in the configuration.

What some systems do is checking if there is an mail server in that domain (an MX record), and then asking if the user exists. So it could ask to mrdoob.com: does "mrdoob" exist?, just before delivering an e-mail or not.

But it can be really time-expensive. A solution could be to do that just when e-mails have surpassed a minimum threshold of "spam score". Or something like that...
December 19th 2006, sole