E2E spam argument (was Re: [e2e] latest spate of cruft postings to e2e)

[Ted Faber]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 07:20:05AM -0800, Mark Baugher wrote:
> Spamassassin breaks my mail connectivity in at least one important way:  It 
> throws away my mother's email unless it is explicitly white listed. 
[ details of the false positive causes deleted ]
>         False positive but an annoying one for me and would have been much 
> worse if I did not call her every week.
> 
> Such problems abound.  Curbing spam is a middle-to-middle problem and not 
> and end-to-end problem IMHO.

I don't understand how your example supports your conclusion.

The two ends of your mail connection (your Mom's mailer and yours) are
the points that need to be configured to get the mail through.  Only the
endpoints have the information to correctly remove the false positive.
That information is that your Mom's forged address is acceptable to
your end, and probably only your end.  Only an end-to-end solution seems
possible at all, though information from internal nodes of the network
might be used as a performance enhancement.  That sounds like a classic
end-to-end argument to me.

Have you picked different ends or am I missing something?

[Hmmm.  I guess you could do the filtering at, say, your ISP's mail hub.
I don't think that makes spam detection less of an end-to-end issue, because 

	1. Not all mail follows that model, and an end-to-end solution
	   is required to handle mail that doesn't.  (In other words the
	   hub is a performance enhancement.)

	2. Even if all users have a mail hub, it seems meaningful to
	   talk about the communication as being mailbox to mailbox, in
	   which case filtering at the hub is doing the work at the
	   endpoint.  We may not agree on that definition of endpoint as
	   mailbox, but I think that considering mail delivery to end at
	   a mailbox (on the hub) and reading of mail to be accomplished
	   by remotely accessing that mailbox (from a workstation) to be
	   a reasonable model.  YMMV.
]

-- 
Ted Faber
http://www.isi.edu/~faber           PGP: http://www.isi.edu/~faber/pubkeys.asc
Unexpected attachment on this mail? See http://www.isi.edu/~faber/FAQ.html#SIG 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/attachments/20031114/94ef4db4/attachment.bin