| Sumario: | This article reports that unsolicited commercial email, or spam, peddles a variety of dubious products, ranging from pharmaceuticals to abandoned bank accounts. The so-called "phishers" try to steal user names and passwords for online banking. And then, systems are infested with viruses, worms and other malware. Although there are would-be solutions to these problems, some of them have the potential to do far more harm than good. An obvious approach to spam fighting is some form of sender authentication. Authenticated email solves some problems. If nothing else, it hinders the spread of email worms, since the infected machine will be positively identified. Furthermore, there are some situations where a list of permitted senders is in fact used. In the best of these schemes, purported identity is used to drive some sort of challenge and response scheme. Authenticated email would provide some protection here, though even without it successful "joe jobs" — forgery of a legitimate user's identity — are relatively uncommon.
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