A new order is coming. On November 24th, Meng Weng Wong released a helpful treatise on how the ISP and software vendor communities can band together to make things really quite rough on spammers. Too long have MTA administrators suffers the depredations of UBE. SMTP shall rise up, and purge itself of the cancerous growth that is spam.

In our quest to restore our former glory, end-users will embrace port 587 StartTLS or be consumed by the cleansing fires of progress, rogue mail servers shall be put to the wrack, and senders shall participate in web-of-trust extortion schemes or face expulsion from the community. SPF and SES uber alles! Tanks shall roll through Warsaw! The Rhine will be re-militarized! The purity and majesty of our mail system must be defended!

Okay, now that I’ve flipped out a bit, I’d like to say that I welcome changes that make it harder for spammers to thrive at the expense of ISPs and consequently the expense of the public, but am concerned that the proposed measures are extreme in nature. Amongst the system administrators that makes sure that your legitimate email is delivered, there appears to be a simmering radicalism. Well-intentioned folks like Meng Weng Wong should be careful, lest they jostle the end-user too harshly.