How to put an end to Virus Infected Spam Bots
From Computer Tyme Support Wiki
Many people think that there's no way to win the war against the spam bot army. I don't agree. I think that it is winable and that through policy changes but ISPs that virus infected computers can be detected and isolated. This is a war we can with without restricting good email or infringing on the freedoms of people to freely communicate. In this article I will try to outline the problem and simple changes that can lead to a solution. The more ISPs adopt these ideas the less spam and viruses we will all have to deal with.
Contents |
Defining the Problem
One of the problems with Spam comes from the history of SMTP. Originally email was send between Unix servers over SMTP. The user created an email message from the Unix command line. That message was sent from the sending server to the receiving server where it was appending to the receivers mail file. At that time only sophisticated users had email and there was no spam.
As time went on more people gained access to the Internet and instead of user logging into Unix shell accounts users had PCs and email clients. Even though servers still stored email in Unix accounts the end users never logged into a Unix shell. Instead they downloaded they email using POP/IMAP protocols which gave them email access from their personal computers.
Consumers and Experts
As the internet grew more and more common people had access to email and people started spamming these users to advertise commercial products. But the spammers evolved into scams and criminal identy theft. Not the Internet is very different with most people being consumers and the original technical people being only a small fraction of Internet users.
This leads to what I will call two classifications of people which I will refer to as "consumers" and "experts". A consumer is a person who just wants to surf the web and get email without having to understand anything about how things work. These people are generally (for the purpose of this discussion) technically unsophisticated and are vulnerable to being misled or tricked into allowing theivs to install viruses on their system.
Problems with the old SMTP model in the Modern World
One of the problems with the SMTP model in the modern world is that although consumers get their email using POP/IMAP they still send email using SMTP. The problem with this is that receiving SMTP servers have no way to distinguish a connection from a real email server from a virus infected spam bot. The SMTP protocol has evolved though and there are not new alternatives that have been standardized and I believe that using the existing new standards we can isolate viruses so they can't send spam and they can't spread.
The trick is to prevent consumers from talking to servers other than the putgoing SMTP server they are supposed to use. This can be accomplished by using Submission (port 587) instead of SMTP.
Submission can be as simple as SMTP on an alternate port without a password but restricted to the ISPs customers, or it can be authenticated SMTP open to the world but requiring a user name and password to access.
