Licensing and Other Questions

[David MacQuigg]

On Sat, 27 Aug 2005 01:35:58 +0300, Christos Georgiou
<tzot at sil-tec.gr> wrote:

>Your method is/will_not be free (as in beer), as hinted in
>http://www.ece.arizona.edu/~edatools/home/email/registry/Form-Sender01.htm
>.  *That* is a drawback similar to the licensing of the Microsoft's
>Sender/Caller-ID scheme.  Why not support open, free standards?

These are fees for services, not license fees.  I don't know how you
could miss that.  The code is offered under the Python licence, which
is the most unrestrictive of any license I know about.

One of my goals is to provide an open-source version of what big
companies are now paying millions for - spam appliances with
proprietary methods.


On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:20:05 GMT, jjl at pobox.com (John J. Lee) wrote:
>[David, in an earlier email]
>> reject.  15% will get an immediate accept without filtering, because
>> the sender is authenticated and has a good reputation.  Eventually,
>> all reputable senders will join the 15%, and the 5% will shrink to
>> where we can ignore it.
>
>Two questions you seem to be implicitly assuming particular answers
>to: Is widespread authentication a good thing?  Does it solve any
>problem not solved by Bayesian filtering plus good mail client
>support?  My first reaction is to answer "no" to both questions, so to
>regard your effort as harmful.  Might be interesting to hear why you
>think it's a good thing, though.

I really didn't intend for this to be a discussion of the merits of
filtering vs authentication.  I worry this will be a long discussion,
with no satisfactory conclusion, so I suggest we move these topics to
one of the email security forums.  My conclusion, after participating
in many such discussions, is that both filtering and authentication
are necessary tools, and a complete system should have both.

--
Dave