Posted on 04/11/2005 10:12:57 AM PDT by ShadowAce
The first and most germane being the email is *received* on port 25 -- not sent from it.
Which makes the article more or less useless.
I dont disagree with that, taxing is not the solution nor are 'MA1L B0MBS' a solution...
The solution requires a number of facets: Introduce an authentication system which requires identities to be globally verifiable. Public keys could be held by the auth servers. In order to send mail, you would need to be able to access the public key of the recipient -- and a certificate encrypted with the public key of the target mail server that contains the identity of the sender, the identity of the target, the identity of the auth server, and a CRC for the message. Keys could be replicated among trusted auth servers. So what does this do? It enables an email server to immediately verify that an email message originated from an authenticated source; if not, it dumps the email immediately. Problem solved. Whoever runs the auth servers could have a policy where you pay a certain amount for each email sent. Anything less than, say, 250 messages per month is free; anything more would cost n cents per message. Which would make it too costly for spammers to continue sending spam.
In fact, I agree. I am not a fan of taxation as much as I tossed it out to play the Devils Advocate and see if any consumption tax fans would see the paradox. As it is now, the Internet is a virtual lesson in the problems of a Global Village and International Government.
Not true: lots of ISPs don't bother to create in-addrs for even private highspeed connections (e.g., cable modems), and you'd be surprised how many medium -> large sites don't have in-addrs for their outbound email relays :)
The idiots will just come up with new zombies that use different ports.......
That's a little above my pay grade, if you get my drift.
What you propose would work, but what you get out of it is no different than a person creating a deny *, and putting allowed addresses infront of it.
And how do you propose taxing the spammer who hijacks Grandma's computer? Are you going to tax Grandma to teach her a lesson about her lack of computer savvy?
25 is the "well known" port for internet email. If they use a different port the mail servers won't talk to them.
And they would be denied until they do. There is no way to fix this problem without some pain to somebody out there. What we need to find is the low hanging fruit and reverse lookup is one of them..
I started getting all sorts of "bounced" email messages and cannot deliver messages for one of my email addresses.
Before I disabled the address I was gettiing over 20,000 emails a day.
I'm on it!.....................
Crap.....I just wound up emailing myself 100,000 pics of Camilla and the Stack of Wheat!!!
Mail is both sent and received via port 25. The server that hosts the mailbox listens on port 25 for incoming mail, and listens on 110 & 143 for end users to download their mail. All outgoing mail from a client is sent via port 25- for typical consumers all messages are sent to the ISP's server which then relays it to the final destination server, which is also listening on 25. The proposal is to allow users to send via port 25 to their own ISP's server but not to any other servers on the internet.
I think such a solution would work for about 5 minutes before the spammers get around it. All they need to do is go into the registry or ini files, get the ISP's mail address and route all spam through the ISP's server. The ISP could lock out zombies that exceed a traffic threshold but the load on the servers would still be extremely heavy.
When I set up my mail server it took less than a day to discover the importance of IN-ARPA-ADDR registration. Most ISPs don't do a reverse lookup but a significant number of corporate mail systems do, which I found out after about 25% of the outbound traffic got hung up in my server.
I'm surprised I have to write this on this forum, but there is a difference between paying a private company for a service and paying the government a tax.
Tell me this, oh wise one. What government-controlled schemes like your email tax has kept junk mail out of your snail mailbox?
The government already charges them postage, yet they keep sending it. Why do they do this and why hasn't postage kept them from sending it?
What's your next grand solution when the spammers gladly pay the tax to keep filling your mailbox with spams for porn, bogus MLM schemese, "phishing" and "spoofing"?
They're making millions (or, at least thousands) and the government will charge them pennies and you think that will stop them? Ho, ho, ho...
If so, I've got some beach-front property in Kansas you might be interested in buying...
Incoming mail is received on port 25. Mail can be sent on any port. 110 and 143 are for POP and IMAP, respectively, which are client applications. IMHO.
Port 25 is used for all mail transfers in both directions. You are correct about 110 and 143- their purpose is to allow client access to mailboxes while 25 facilitates delivery.
Further on that- yes, you can send from any port but you have to specify port 25 on the server at the other end to make a connection.
And that's what they're wanting the ISP's to block - outbound connections to port 25, something a customer PC would only do if it's acting as a mail server. If a customer want's to operate their own mailserver they would need to contact their ISP and arrange for them to use the ISP's mailserver as a smarthost for outbound mail. Not really a hard thing set up.
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