Anti-spam SMTP mods

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Sorry about that, not enough coffee yet...
On Tuesday March 9 2004 12:45 am, Lucas Peet wrote:

> Why not just have all mail servers setup with their own GPG keys ..

There are already authorization methods, and means that allow only trusted 
servers to connect to your server.  SSL is one of the preferred methods.  As 
long as you trust the connecting server, you can trust mail from it, assuming 
it is adequately protected against relaying from bogus hosts.

The problem is, not everybody wants to restrict connections to only known 
servers - they want unknown servers to connect as well.  Besides that, 
there's the issue of standards.  Is Microsoft going to allow Novell servers 
to connect to Exchange servers, given their history of breaking the other 
guy's protocol.

I think that's one of the reasons all these ideas for securing and authorizing 
mail fail to catch on.  I know I have no enthusiasm for setting up a 
"handshake" system that will reach maybe two or three percent of the servers 
out there.