Gary Lawrence Murphy:
>This is for the whitelist fans: Can someone please tell us why the
>following extremely frequent spam header pattern would _not_ pass a
>whitelist test? The letter itself is most certainly spam/viral and
>was most certainly not sent by me, but I see no way you might tell that it
>was not, nor can I see how I might charge the sender with fraud for having
>'impersonated' my account. .. My uneducated guess  is that all they need to
>jump expensive whitelist
>walls would be buckshot a spam-laden Klez ..
There are several issues here.
(1) For reasons that have nothing to do with
commercial advertising, we need email software that
prevents virus attacks a la Melissa and Klez. We
simply can't continue down the path where every
script kiddie with a grudge or political agenda can
cause millions or billions of dollars worth of
damage.
(2) Very likely, email practices will evolve to the
point that digital signatures are the standard way
to recognize the sender of a message. Sabotaging
your machine or otherwise compromising your private
key will be the only way that someone can forge a
message from you. I don't see any reason that email
software that automatically uses digital signatures
for contact management and whitelisting would be
any more expensive than existing email clients.
Unless Microsoft manages to get a defacto monopoly
on it.
(3) I think identity theft should be made a felony,
with very stiff penalties, for reasons that have
nothing to do with spam. No, obviously, simply
parading around with a sign that says "I'm George
Bush" is not identity theft. On the other hand,
I think using a virus to compromise someone else's
private key should should fall into that category.
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1])
	by phobos.labs.netnoteinc.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id EDC1F4416E
	for <jm@localhost>; Mon, 12 Aug 2002 05:56:49 -0400 (EDT)
from phobos [127.0.0.1]
	by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0)
	for jm@localhost (single-drop); Mon, 12 Aug 2002 10:56:50 +0100 (IST)
from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix)
    with ESMTP id B0CFF294154; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 00:57:05 -0700 (PDT)
from relay.pair.com (relay1.pair.com [209.68.1.20]) by xent.com
    (Postfix) with SMTP id D562B294150 for <fork@xent.com>; Sun,
    11 Aug 2002 00:56:43 -0700 (PDT)
from adsl-67-119-24-15.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (HELO golden)
    (67.119.24.15) by relay1.pair.com with SMTP; 11 Aug 2002 07:57:45 -0000
From fork-admin@xent.com  Mon Aug 12 11:09:47 2002