A Zero Spam Mail System [Feedback Request]

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Hello Everyone,

My name is Viruthagiri Thirumavalavan. I’m the guy who proposed SMTP over TLS on Port 26 last month. I’m also the guy who attacked (???) John Levine.

Today I have something to show you.

Long story short… I solved the email spam problem. Well… Actually I solved it long time back. I’m just ready to disclose it today. Again…

Yeah… Yeah… Yeah… If only I had a dime for every time people insult me for saying “I solved the spam problem”

They usually start with the insult like “You think you are the inventor of FUSSP?”

These guys always are the know-it-all assholes. They don’t listen. They don’t want to listen. They are like barking dogs. If one started to bark, everyone else gets the courage to do the same thing.

I’m tired of fighting these assholes in every mailing list. I’m on your side morons. So how about you all knock it off?

Six months back, it was John Levine who humiliated me in the DMARC list. Apparently, for him 50 words are enough to attack me.

Töma Gavrichenkov and Suresh Ramasubramanian even started to defend this man saying 50 words are enough to judge a 50,000 words paper. [We are gonna figure it out today]

2

<plonk>

- John

3

I’d be a lot more inclined to read your paper if you weren’t so self-righteous about it. Rehashing all the times people disagreed with (“attacked”) you is a poor way to encourage others to earnestly engage with your ideas.

4

You literally lost my interest in reading your solution when I realized that 99.99999999999% of this post is just you railing against people.

People are right, if you can’t get my attention in 50 words, then either your solution isn’t a solution but a marketing ploy, or you need someone who actually knows how to present things to people in this field.

Im a former DNSbl maintainer - I get excited over new anti spam solutions and love to throw resources at new solutions.

So yeah, this is a non starter.

5

This is truly awful and off topic for network engineering. Please stop and try to listen to the people who are offering you feedback. On other lists. Not here.

Thanks!

T

6

There's this small percentage of cranks that are brilliant Doc Emmett
Brown level inventors who come up with truly brilliant products and
solutions. And then there's the much larger percentage of cranks that
have a bad idea that they're prepared to defend to the last. Very
well then ..

7

Viruthagiri Thirumavalavan wrote :
I solved the email spam problem.

Oh, this is wonderful news.
There are plenty of other problems that need your brilliance. In no specific order :

- Global warming.
- Nuclear proliferation.
- Peace in the middle east.
- World hunger.
- IPv6 multihoming.

We will be looking for your next improvement.

TSI Disclaimer: This message and any files or text attached to it are intended only for the recipients named above and contain information that may be confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not forward, copy, use or otherwise disclose this communication or the information contained herein. In the event you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by replying to this message, and then delete all copies of it from your system. Thank you!...

8

I can't get past all the blabbering to bother reviewing stuff.

But why does this guy remind me of Shiva Ayyadurai - you know, the "inventor of email."

Seriously - isn't the general rule to start with a demonstration, not a polemic? (Shiva actually built an email system. And people actually used it.)

9

... and of all those, once you solve v6 multihoming (possibly with ipv9) do come back to nanog where I'm sure it will be operational.

    > Viruthagiri Thirumavalavan wrote :
    > I solved the email spam problem.
    
    Oh, this is wonderful news.
    There are plenty of other problems that need your brilliance. In no specific order :
    
    - Global warming.
    - Nuclear proliferation.
    - Peace in the middle east.
    - World hunger.
    - IPv6 multihoming.
    
    We will be looking for your next improvement.
    
    TSI Disclaimer: This message and any files or text attached to it are intended only for the recipients named above and contain information that may be confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not forward, copy, use or otherwise disclose this communication or the information contained herein. In the event you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by replying to this message, and then delete all copies of it from your system. Thank you!...

10

Not to derail this highly relevant thread, and forgive my ignorance, but what’s the issue with IPv6 multihoming?

11

Spam and email really aren't "on-topic" for NANOG. That said, I was intrigued, so I did get a several dozen pages into your white paper.

1) If you wrote that, you need to stop and hire/con someone else to do
    your tech writing. To say your writing is atrocious does not do it
    justice.

2) The ideas look like they may have some merit, except that the average
    Internet/email user is neither capable of nor willing to manage domboxes
    for every entity from which they expect to receive transactional email.

I didn't get much further into the paper than this, because, as mentioned, your writing style SUCKS and I'm not strapped into my poetry appreciation chair, so you can't make me endure any more of it.

So, in summary, too complicated for my mom to use, and such a crappy delivery of the idea that I can't imagine anyone will get through the entire pitch (to tell you what the other flaws are).

12

Anyone else having flashbacks to Jim Fleming telling us about how IPv8 was the final ultimate solution to IPv4 runout?

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My name is Viruthagiri Thirumavalavan. I'm the guy who proposed SMTP over
TLS on Port 26

Unfortunately, your attempt there didn't demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of
the email ecology of the sort needed to *actually* solve the spam problem.

Today I have something to show you.

Long story short.... I solved the email spam problem. Well... Actually I
solved it long time back. I'm just ready to disclose it today. Again...

So actually *disclose* it already, rather than whining about how you've been
treated.

And there's this telling statement:

[Today's discussion is about whether I solved the spam problem. Not about how
I'm gonna distribute the solution]

You apparently don't understand that how the solution gets distributed is a
very important part of whether the solution will work.

Bottom line: You hit most of the points in Vernon Schryver's FUSSP list, plus
an amazing number of points in John Baez's crackpot index. Not a good way to
start.

So because I'm needing some entertainment, I went to go check the Medium post.

"Spammers have no idea what's going on INSIDE the email system. i.e. They
have no idea whether their mail gets marked as spam or not."

Oh, you poor, poor uneducated person. Spammers have a *very good* idea
of whether it was marked as spam.

"Now, what if your first mail get rejected with an error message like "Unauthorized Sender"?
Would you still write your follow-up mail? No, right?"

At which point you totally miss the point - for a spammer, the reasonable thing to do
is *send another mail with a different From: value*, in hopes of hitting one that's
an "authorized sender".

"So when mails get rejected with an error message, spammers gonna remove your
email address from their email list. That's because your email address is a
dead end for them."

OK, I'm done here. We obviously have a total lack of understanding of the
problem space, and it's very unlikely that an actually correct solution will
arise from that.

Also, I'll offer you a totally free piece of technical advice: Those SAD
entries in the DNS that you're hoping to use to tie domains together are
trivially forgeable.

To save everybody else the effort: As far as I can tell, he's re-invented plus
addressing, and says that if everybody creates mailboxes john.smith@example.com
for personal mail, and a john.smith+nanog@example.com for nanog mail, and
john.smith+my-bank@example.com for his bank emails, spam will apparently give
up in defeat

There's a whole bunch more, including assuming that Joe Sixpack *will* create a
separate address for each "transactional" piece of mail, that spammers won't
send mail that looks like personal mail, that spammers won't create bogus DNS
entries, and a few other whoppers...

14

I was thinking more of the guy who was convinced that each octet in an IPV4
address could store 0 through 256.

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That's what the overflow flag is for, right?

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[Today’s discussion is about whether I solved the spam problem. Not about how
I’m gonna distribute the solution]

You apparently don’t understand that how the solution gets distributed is a
very important part of whether the solution will work.

If only everyone would change everything about how they do everything overnight, pay me/my company, and trust me/my company as a central authority… well, we’d have no problems, I guarantee it!

I tried whole-assedly skimming the first two dozen pages of his pdf doc and switched to half-assedly for the latter several hundred pages. My take-away is that he has a company called dombox/teleport, and if we pay him to authorize us as not being spammers, then we’re not spammers. But instead of simply that, also every system and the way everyone uses email, including trusting him as a primary point of authority, has to change before it works. Page 121 states that every website on the entire internet will need to implement his buttons.

There’s also some rather onerous sounding stuff around page 115 where he states that users won’t be able to delete their email accounts, or the contents thereof. So I’m pretty sure this system is entirely in violation of European law.

“Now, what if your first mail get rejected with an error message like “Unauthorized Sender”?
Would you still write your follow-up mail? No, right?”

At which point you totally miss the point - for a spammer, the reasonable thing to do
is send another mail with a different From: value, in hopes of hitting one that’s
an “authorized sender”.

Further, most recipients can’t be burdened with having to authorize every potential sender. Systems implementing that logic have been implemented in various and sundry places, and never for very long.

To save everybody else the effort: As far as I can tell, he’s re-invented plus
addressing, and says that if everybody creates mailboxes john.smith@example.com
for personal mail, and a john.smith+nanog@example.com for nanog mail, and
john.smith+my-bank@example.com for his bank emails, spam will apparently give
up in defeat

I’m pretty sure there was something in there about paying him to act as a central authority too, you’ve gotta half-assedly skim another hundred pages to get to it, though.

Take care,
Matt

17

I made it a few dozen pages into the white paper, it's 200+ pages long
and TBH just rambles on about what spam bots are and other basic
definitions.

No one who doesn't know all that will even attempt to read your paper
I don't think.

THAT SAID, I got to the point where it required CAPTCHAs of senders
and thought well, that's theoretically possible, but quite a threshold
to expect of others who may not much care if you read their email, but
you the recipient may care a lot and oh well you never get the mail.

It doesn't add much, really, and spammers figured out how to bust
things like CAPTCHAs decades ago*.

I accept there's probably more to your idea, put it on one or two
pages.

* Take the CAPTCHA image, flash it up on another site which offers
access to free porn for solving the CAPTCHA, forward answer to
original site.

18

Agreed.

I’ve never seen someone so excited to have reinvented TMDA from the 1990’s. Please, tell us more how the Internet will readdress itself to meet your fascinating solution.

Can we go back to talking about network engineering now?

19

a message of 515 lines which said:

My name is Viruthagiri Thirumavalavan. I'm the guy who proposed SMTP
over TLS on Port 26

Besides all the excellent remarks that were made here (and I seriously
urge you to read them; really), I want to add:

It's my 5 years of research. So it's worth more than 50 words.

You have a very strange way of measuring the importance of
something. A lot of people spent 30 years or more on useless and
stupid things. The time past is *not* a good indicator of value.

My prototype codebase has around 200,000 lines of code. [To be exact:
466,965 ++ 254,169 --]

Same thing for source code. Boasting of the number of lines, as if it
measured value of the program, won't make people interested. Really,
this metric was abandoned or at east downplayed more than thirty years
ago.

Sequoia Capital is one of the well known venture firm in the
world. They have invested in over 250 companies since 1972,
including Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Stripe, YouTube, Instagram,
Yahoo! and WhatsApp.

Come on, most people on this list have a lot of experience with the
wonderful world of Silicon Valley startups. We have seen a lot of
dollars invested in really stupid projects. "One VC gave me money"
proves nothing, except that some people have too much money and too
little sense.

20

Just gone through all your replies.

Literally everyone attacking me here. Could you tell me why? Because I have been rude to John Levine, right? So you all think you have the right to give me “mob justice”. But as an innocent man I have to suffer all John Levine attacks because he is a most valued member of NANOG. Is that what you are all saying?

There is only one regret I have in this situation. I shouldn’t have been rude with Töma Gavrichenkov and Suresh Ramasubramanian. That’s because they didn’t know what happened between John and me 6 months back. Most probably they would never have behaved with me in the way John behaved. I wasn’t paying attention to that part. When I noticed the word “50 words”, I thought they are mocking me too.