David Honig wrote: > > At 02:42 PM 12/18/01 -0800, Meyer Wolfsheim wrote: > >On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote: > > > >> Can't spam be repelled by not forwarding email not encrypted to > >> the remailer's key? > > > >Who is to say that spammers won't use remailer clients that automatically > >encrypt to the remailers' keys? > > Yes they could. > > > > >Using remailer clients should be *easy*. Saying "this is too hard for the > >average spammer to figure out" isn't acceptable. > > The most commonly held point of view that I've > perceived on this list is that spammers are too lazy/stupid > to do this -or even add a simple string token to a line.
To maximize their efficiency *, spammers want to send the same message to everyone on a large list of addresses, with a small amount of effort and attention on their part. Any special effort necessary to get the spam to a given address is not a worthwhile ROI. (And it's probably not worth the effort to remove the address from the list, either.) This is also the point behind the hashcash proposal: the sender's machine has to burn a certain number of cycles to make a hash which will convince the recipient to accept each message. ** * Efficiency is the useful output divided by the effort input. "Efficiency" for a useless endeavor such as spamming is problematical. ** Eric, if you're reading this, I really am putting some work in on this, just not at a high enough rate to produce any output. Efficiency of 0. -- Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere Have GNU, will travel