[Nottingham] email and spam

[ForkBombFluf]

On Tue, 10 Jun 2008, Martin wrote:

>> (deal with the top posting, Martin, I'm not quite finished yet --> )
>
> OOoooer, on-list or over a few beers? Will Andy be jealous??

Why should he be jealous when he can watch? :-P

> [---]
>> How so?  If they're snooping anyway, what's stopping them from grabbing
>> your public key and encrypting a nice advertizment for some choice
>> medication for you?  Or would you just never accept any mail from
>
> That requires /directed/ mail rather than random spewings. That will
> make it slightly more costly to send the spam and so reduce it slightly.

Somewhat, yes...

> It would stop 'bounces' getting usefully abused to multiply up the spam.

Not sure I follow this.  unless you just mean the backscatter bounces 
resulting from the spammers having spoofed my address to send their offers 
to a nonexistant/full/etc. mailbox.  (SPF should be helping to alleviate 
that some as well.)

> It would stop spam forgery in your name.

If the recpient already knows me and my public key, yes...  Like most of 
these good ideas, everyone has to play along for it to be effective 
though.  It wouldn't stop them spoofing my e-mail address (alone) to send 
their rubbish to anyone not paying attention to digital signatures.

>> And anwyay, how would it stop e-mail getting lost?
>
> It won't, but it will stop your lost mail being read by anyone else
> unintended. Much better than the very weak disclaimers "please do not
> read if not for you" pseudo-legal mail sigs.

Very true, it will certainly stop it being read by any and all.

And yes, the silly disclaimers seem about as useful as the "Please don't 
click on this link unless you are 18 years old." barriers to entering 
various nefarious websites. (Mercurian years are good enough, right?)

Fnord,

-Stef