Now there is an idea! However an improved variant is to make the
entire internet a 'trust relationship' using the (obvious) steps you
propose. For several months I have been pondering possible details of
implementing same; see <http://www.camblab.com/misc/univ_std.txt>.
Comments welcome.
Jeffrey Race
Surely it already is ? That is I only announce routes of my customers who I
trust, my upstreams and peers trust me and what i announce to them, their
upstreams/peers do and so on. And yet we still have hijacked netblocks and
ddos's with uncaring sysadmins. Why should email be any different?
And if you do implement such a system, the spammers will just adapt.. the recent
viruses (sobig) are an example of how spammers can open up end user machines to
facilitate sending of email, providing they can control such a host they can
simply relay thro the providers' smtps.. they dont need open relays to send out
their junk!
I think we're still trying to treat the symptom tho not the cause. Most of these
spammers are companies based within our countries, if we can make their kind of
advertising illegal the spam will reduce (not sure if it will disappear, it
could be like tax - companies may open offshore offices to facilitate this, but
we need to keep working on the cause... )
Steve