[Python-Dev] The first trustworthy <wink> GBayes results

[Guido van Rossum]

> Erik Naggum made an interesting comment.  He said that spam should be
> handled at the transport level.  Greg's work on doing filtering at SMTP
> time accomplishes this and makes a lot of sense.  When a message is
> rejected, the sending mail server is the one that has to deal with it.
> In the case of spam, the sending server is often an open rely.  Letting
> it handle the bounces is sweet justice. :-)

In the case of a false positive, it has the added advantage that at
least the poor sender, falsely accused of sending spam, gets a bounce
and may try to try again.

> I bring this up because "STMP time filtering" makes a bypass mechanism
> work much better.  With a system like TMDA, confirmation notices usually
> generate double-bounces.  Instead, we could reject the message with a
> 5xx error that includes instructions on how to bypass the filter (e.g.
> include a cookie in the body of the message).

Do you still believe that TMDA is the only answer to spam?

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)