Differences between version 6 and predecessor to the previous major change of WhySignEmail.
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| Newer page: | version 6 | Last edited on Monday, August 25, 2003 4:16:15 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
| Older page: | version 3 | Last edited on Wednesday, September 18, 2002 11:05:46 am | by CraigBox | Revert |
@@ -11,7 +11,13 @@
!Setting a pattern
If you have never signed an email in your life and someone forges an email from you containing important information (eg: "I am going to officially resign from my place of work"), then you can't argue that "if it was important then I would have sent it encrypted/signed! It obviously wasn't from me!"
-!!Why not sign
email
+!!Spam
+Any
email that is encrypted (that you can decrypt of course...) is unlikely to be spam -- spending time encrypting the same message for millions of recipients costs the sender far too much in CPU time. Any encrypted email is obviously important and personal.
-Cos
you don
't really care
. ;
)
+You can also use the web of trust as a way of figuring out who spammers are. If the email
you recieved is signed by someone in your web of trust then they are unlikely to be a spammer. If it turns out that they are you can set their level of trust to "none" and perhaps lower the amount of trust of everyone who signed their key. A spammer will have a hard time finding people to sign their new key every time they want to send another email.
+
+!Viruses
+Even if you run a better OperatingSystem, viruses that use email to propagate typically send themselves to random recipients with a fake "From" header. As above, if you have a history of signing your email, it is easier to convince other people that you didn
't send them a particular email
. (The Sobig family of viruses have been very successful at propagating using email
).
+----
+Part of CategorySecurity
