[Enigmail] [off-topic] Re: Signing message headers

[Phil Stracchino]

Robert J. Hansen wrote:
>> I've pondered various times the idea of mailservers signing certain key
>> headers in each message they originate or relay.  It would enable
>> unambiguous identification of the real source or injection point of any
>> spam with headers forged to conceal its origin. 
> 
> It would only allow identification of those mailservers that supported
> this new feature.  Spammers would instead use spam-friendly mailservers
> that were not configured so.

People would still have the option of simply dropping all mail that
wasn't source-authenticated.

> Also, signatures are phenomenally expensive, from a CPU cycle
> perspective.  Doing one signature per message would bring high-volume
> servers to their knees.

Yeah, that wasn't lost on me.  I first started thinking about this when
Microsoft proposed their inane idea of "controlling spam" by requiring
every mail server to perform some arbitrary complex calculation before
it could deliver each message, and then somehow proving that it had done
the calculation, for no other reason than to burn CPU time and make mail
delivery computationally expensive.  (I consider it one of their more
bone-headed ideas ever.)  My basic thought was, "Hey, if you're going to
burn those CPU cycles anyway, you might as well do something *useful*
with them."


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2         ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
  alaric at caerllewys.net            alaric at metrocast.net
          It's not the years, it's the mileage.