It is reported (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-1000272.html) that
Earthlink is about to institute a permission-based spam prevention
system that will require the sender of an e-mail message to an
Earthlink subscriber to confirm that the message is valid before it
will be delivered.

The article makes no mention of the implications, among others, for
the managers of mailing lists. Presumably there will be some sort of
whitelist system to enable Earthlink subscribers to authorise certain
addresses, but we know that whitelists are a clumsy mechanism that
don't work well.

The spam-prevention system would have to be sophisticated, it would
seem, to cope with mailing lists. Will it be triggered by the list
address, or by individual posters' addresses, I wonder? In the latter
case I can imagine an horrific scenario. Suppose that a list has 500
Earthlink subscribers; somebody posting to the list might then get
500 individual requests from the Earthlink spam system asking for
validation.

Can anybody put my mind at rest on this?


--
Michael Quinion