> I agree with the idea of a BOF, but 'anti-spam' is the wrong focus. Spam > is a social problem, not an engineering one.
If by "social problem" you mean that it is a problem that results from human behavior, like lack of a widespread social contract or failure to adhere to a social contract for how to use email, I might agree. But applying that term doesn't help much. Nor should it be taken to imply that there is not a technical solution, or part of a solution, to the problem. Traffic signals, speed measuring radar, lojack, airport metal detectors, turnstiles, locks on doors, and alarm systems are all technical approaches to social problems. Clearly, a lot of spam can be eliminated via technical mechanisms. Social and/or legal mechanisms might also help especially if they have technical mechanisms to back make them more feasible (e.g. by making senders tracable with less effort, and perhaps, by reducing the number of complaints that have to be investigated). Technical, social, and legal mechanisms all have disadvantages and costs. Often addressing a problem with a combination of mechanisms yields a more acceptable solution than insisting on a single kind of mechanism. > I contend that is why we > already have a research group dealing with it (social problems are > inherently difficult for engineers, thus requiring research to figure > out). Focus the group on a tangible engineering problem, deployable > authenticated email. Or as Vixie labeled the more generic, interpersonal > batch communication system. If we are trying to solve the spam problem, we'll be disappointed if 'deployable authenticated mail' or 'interpersonal batch communication system' doesn't solve that problem. And as far as I can tell, neither one will. We need to understand the benefits and limitations of these approaches before we invest a lot of work into them. What users seem to want is to be able to accept mail from anyone without much or any sender-specific prior arrangement (because we want to avoid the hassles of making such arrangements, and because sometimes it really is useful to get mail from people we don't know yet), to send mail for free or extremely low cost, and to not have our mailboxes cluttered up with messages we don't want to see (or for that matter, viruses). There are a lot of other constraints, but these are the big ones. It may not be possible to completely satisfy this set of constraints, but it might be that a slightly different set of constraints would be acceptable. It might also be that different constraints (with different results) are acceptable to different people.