RE: [Asrg] Several Observations and a solution that addressesthem all

[Kee Hinckley <nazgul@somewhere.com>]

At 9:58 AM -0500 3/11/03, Jason Hihn wrote:
> There is one goal: to eliminate spam. If you want social implications at 10,
> 50 and 90 percent then you are missing the point. Social implications are
> irrelevant. Economic ones are the only ones that drive anything. I don't
> care if Joe Blow wants a new spam proof email system - he doesn't control
> his mail servers. His ISP does. And his ISP doesn't want to pay for spam.
> Even if it costs him 15% more than non-spam email (assuming 80% of email is
> spam) that's still significant cost reduction.
Call it social or economic, it's the same thing.  So, let's look at 
the incentives to the ISP.

The ISP installs a system that keeps track of all outbound messages 
and who they went to (is that legal in the EU?) and sets up code to 
respond to verifications.  It then also sets up code to verify all 
incoming mail against the sender's database.

When this is the only ISP to have implemented this service, how many 
spam messages do they block?  Zero.

When 10% of the ISPs have implemented this system, how many spam 
messages do they block?  Far less than 10%.  Because of course, most 
spammers aren't sending from these ISPs in the first place--and they 
certainly aren't sending from these ISPs once they've implemented the 
system.

So. You are asking the ISP to gamble that this technology is the one 
that will be deployed world-wide.  And you are further asking them to 
make this outlay with the full knowledge that the system will not be 
useful until the majority of the world is using it.  Because until 
that time, it is not practical to block messages that don't verify.

It's not going to happen.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/        Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg@ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg