First off, David Jeske (formerly of eGroups, now Yahoo! Groups) has a suggestion stopping the forgery of e-mail. He calls it SMTP Sender Authentication.

My proposal is to do sender authentication at the SMTP level, with a compatible extension to the implementation.

I don't think it's a complete solution (like many of the other proposals out there), but it's better than nothing, that's for sure.

Next, my "spam your own blog" idea seems have been picked up by a number of folks.

Excellent. Thanks for all the TrackBacks.

Finally, I figured out how to fix PageRank today. It happened while I was looking at some recent blog comments and trying to decide if they were spam or not. I decided they're not quite spam but are more like wearing your company's logo shirt everywhere you go. In-your-face advertising that may or may not cross the line, depending on the situation.

Posted by jzawodn at October 09, 2003 11:24 PM

Reader Comments
# Aaron Brady said:

... and the solution is?

on October 10, 2003 02:39 AM
# Sean said:

I wrote some blurbs about using digital identities to tie an email to a sender:

http://ertw.com/blog/archives/000361.html#000361

Been meaning to experiment with the sendmail-tls stuff. I suppose it's similar to David's idea in that it's MTA and signature based, except that I'm just assigning responsibility for the message to the MTA, and he's taking it one step further to authenticate the message (oh, and he calls it "viral incentive", I call it "fax effect)

Sean

on October 10, 2003 05:50 AM
# Chris said:

My $0.02 -- Anything that stops SMTP from letting someone you don't know having any chance of contacting you has got to be bad.

on October 10, 2003 06:15 AM
# Mike Wills said:

Where we successful?

on October 10, 2003 07:33 AM
# Craig said:

Unfortunately this blog column does not have enough room for me to write the solution here?

on October 10, 2003 08:50 AM
# Justin said:

my reply blogged at http://taint.org/2003/10/10/200451a.html ;)

(cheers J for pointing at it, I'd have missed it otherwise.)

on October 10, 2003 12:14 PM
# incognito said:

I stumbled across a blacklist too for MT today. Check out Jay Allens entry on the tool. Although blacklists require maintenance this may help curb the spam for a while.

on October 13, 2003 08:11 PM
# w3bd00d said:

PROBLEM SOLVED?

At the risk of forking this topic (pun intended), would someone please explain in 50 words or less, why all the sturm und drang about "Google Blog Pollution"?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the following Advance Search syntax already exists and, in my experience, works perfectly: "-blog".

w3b

PS: Does posting this mean 500 new hyperlinks for my nom-de-plume will suddenly appear on Google?

on October 14, 2003 08:54 PM
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone. My current, past, or previous employers are not responsible for what I write here, the comments left by others, or the photos I may share. If you have questions, please contact me. Also, I am not a journalist or reporter. Don't "pitch" me.

 

Privacy: I do not share or publish the email addresses or IP addresses of anyone posting a comment here without consent. However, I do reserve the right to remove comments that are spammy, off-topic, or otherwise unsuitable based on my comment policy. In a few cases, I may leave spammy comments but remove any URLs they contain.