Well, I was off on Vancouver Island for nearly a week, and didn't take a laptop with me... Clearly it caused some major trauma because I had the following hallucinatory idea:
I was thinking about the issue in which sending spam isn't a crime in a lot of countries, or if it is that it's poorly enforced. Then I thought of SPF, Domain-Keys, and ways to enforce authenticity using existing laws... And came up with this idea. What if we had a TXT Record in the DNS for a domain that looked like: @ IN TXT "XYZZY 123 456 (C) Copyright 2006 Redfish Solutions, LLC" And then had hosts participating in this scheme generate outgoing mail as: X-Yes-Its-Really-Me: XYZZY 123 456 (C) Copyright 2006 Redfish Solutions, LLC" and uses the presence of this copywritten key to match the appropriate string in the DNS as proof that the sender is who he says he is. Then if the scheme were widely adopted (we could have an applet or script that generated a random string and primed the DNS with it or could be easily cut-n-pasted into the DNS configuration... the MTA could of course extract the string easily, as could anyone else for verification), then it would be a leverage point if someone started forging emails. While sending spam might not be a crime in all civilized countries, copyright infringement is. Is that too "out there?" -Philip