Emailers: Identify Yourselves
from the it's-coming... dept
Having been the victim now of multiple joe jobs where a spammer uses my email address as the "from:" on a large batch of spam, I can understand the direct value of preventing email spoofing. It's no surprise at all that all the big ISPs are implementing email features that prevent spoofing by authenticating the sender. Still the risk is that AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft are all implementing different solutions, and not much thought has been given to the unintended consequences of such systems. While, in some ways, it's good to hear that something is being done, but the potential for problems isn't a good sign. Already, many of those involved admit that many legitimate uses (such as "email this page" functionality found on many websites) will end up breaking. Some say that it's worth it, to stop spam. It might be, but wouldn't we be better off if there was at least some discussion about minimizing the problems?
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MS? Co-operate?
I can't help but suspect MS is trying to engineer yet another protocol it can attempt to lock up. Thus, only its own protocol will be the one used for all windows machines and for sendmail.com software - that's 90% of the client boxes and 60% of the mail servers, according to recent stats (yeah, apparently satanic in their bugginess, but still apparently solid enough to use).
Anyway, since they and sendmail dominate the halves of the equation, the other guys will be rather pointless victims of the Network Effect, just roadkill on a road to nowhere.
Nowhere? yeah, because as soon as everyone else realizes that they need to get either sendmail.com stuff or Win mail servers in order to properly defend against the hordes of zomies out there even now, we'll flip MS/Sendmail.com the bird and go back to what we're doing now: annoying BLs and 6 committees with 'ideas' on how they can reap the extortion potential of a locked-in patented protocol under the guise of 'helping the community'.
Of course, that'll take 2 years or more, during which time we'll all stop using mail because it'll've become 90% crap.
I'm just a ray of sunshine.
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Email this page
I would cheer if "Email this page" no longer worked - the number of unnecessary forwards I get would presumably drop.
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Re: Email this page
Everyone boo hoo's government intervention, but isn't this a perfect example of where STANDARDS could be implemented ?
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