The comments on his post when on for hours. Before I finally bailed, I saw this:

“It makes me wish the e-mail system was designed based on whitelisting or something. I realize how much trouble this would cause, but I might actually be willing to deal with it.”

“Let me help you out a bit — as the guy who released what I’m pretty sure was THE first anti-spam program more than 20 years ago.”

This is where I usually mention that it’s unbelievable that we still use SMTP, endlessly hacking around what’s become painfully clear is a design flaw, rather than designing a different, hopefully backwards-compatible protocol. The amount of cruft that’s been piled on top of this craptastic standard is utterly mind-boggling.

(Seriously… CRAM-MD5? SPF? Bayesian filters? Tarpitting? The endless RBLs? It’s the mother of all kluges.)

Weirder still, this sort of thing strikes me as absolutely counter to the normal disposition of those of us who normally would be expected to solve these things. This problem predates Linux! The open source community built an entire *OS* since then! SFTP replaces FTP, though that’s arguably a far less important protocol. New processor? Gimme! New graphics card? Gimme gimme! iPhone! Woo! AJAX! Ruby! We have entire programming languages younger than SMTP.

Yet despite an almost immeasurable amount of anger, vitriol, and frustration, the beast lumbers on year after year, unchanged. HELO? EHLO? Qua?

The number of hours that’ve been poured into designing filters and maintaining blacklists and so on surely could have yielded something better by now. Sometimes I think about it and it’s almost embarrassing.

Anyway.

Posted by: Adam | October 30, 2007 at 07:43 PM

 I could not have said it better myself. This is exactly what I have been thinking. All of the kludges around SMTP do not address the underlying problem. SMTP presumes that the message is not spam. SMTP will allow any server to connect, dump a few megabytes of crap and leave it to the recipient to sort it out.

So here it is. I am now committed to writing several posts about how I believe the problem could be solved. Who knows, I may even try to implement some of it.